Posted by
Owen Densmore on
Oct 30, 2009; 3:55pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Crutchfield-s-Is-anything-ever-new-tp3917261p3919813.html
Jim's Davis site has the paper, along with the longer technical paper:
http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/EverNew.pdf http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/EverNewTitlePage.htm -- Owen
On Oct 29, 2009, at 11:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> All,
>
> Over the years I can remember many animated conversations among
> psychologists about whether it is possible to see something new,
> since there is no way for the cognitive machinery to recognize
> something for which it does not already have a template. Often
> cited in those discussions was the reported experience of people who
> had congenital cateracts removed and could not, for a time, see
> anything.
>
> the answer to this cocktail party conundrum has always seemed to me
> an emphatic YES and NO. No we cannot see anything entirely new,
> however nothing that we encounter is ever entirely new. so, for
> instance, let it be the case that you had never heard of unicorns,
> never seen an illustration of a unicorn, etc, and a unicorn were to
> trot into the St. Johns Cafe tomorrow. Would you see it? Well, if
> you knew about horses and narwhales, I would say yes, because while
> you would not immediately see a unicorn you would see a horse with a
> narwale tusk in the middle of its forehead.
>
> Now, it seems to me that Crutchfield's essay (in the Emergence book,
> for those of you who have it) is asking the scientific version of
> that question.
> Do we actually ever discover anything new. His explicit answer, in
> the last paragraph of the essay, would seem to be "yes", but the
> argument seems in many places to lead in the oppsite direction.
> Discovery, he seems to argue, consists of shifting from one form of
> computation to another where forms of computation are defined by a
> short list of machine-types.
>
> Has anybody out there read the article and have an opinion on this
> matter?
>
> Popper's falsificationism would seem to imply that scientists never
> DISCOVER anything new; they IMAGINE new things, and then, having
> imagined them, find them. Bold Conjectures, he called it. Seems
> to go along with Kubie's idea of the preconscious as a place where
> pieces of experience get scrambled into new combinations.
>
> Nick
>
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