Posted by
glen e. p. ropella-2 on
Oct 30, 2009; 7:52pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Crutchfield-s-Is-anything-ever-new-tp3917261p3921137.html
Of course, I agree wholeheartedly with Crutchfield's conjecture that
some sort of "pattern closure" is necessary for emergence to make any
ontological sense. (I'm sure everyone agrees I've beaten that horse to
death, though my distinction between phenomenon and property hit the
list with a very elastic wet thud. ;-)
And although I don't particularly like his mechanism-phenomena
construction that allows novel structures (as well as discovery) -- i.e.
his "computational mechanics", he's certainly in the right ballpark.
But when you take this sort of thing out of its context (which you do by
asking your question in the context of _mind_ and personal experience),
you seem to miss Popper's point entirely. And, since Crutchfield's
point requires explicit consideration of the observer (measurements),
you seem to have missed his point, too.
Re: Popper's falsificationism has nothing to do with imagining and then
falsifying the imaginings. It is the proposition that reality is
unattainable and only approachable in the limit. You can't look
directly at it. You can only look _around_ it. Further, the "looking"
is behavior-based, not thought-based at all. It literally does not
matter what crazy thoughts are going through the minds of the
experimenters. What matters is that the experimenters are all _doing_
the same thing to get the same result. That's because _doing_ (actions
... I know, I beat this horse dead, too...) translates from person to
person (though perhaps not from person to horse or elephant to
bacterium) and thoughts do NOT translate from person to person.
Justificationism is the enemy, here in this proposition.
So, scientists do not imagine then find novelty via critical
rationalism. They construct and select amongst various _methods_ of
interacting with the world, whatever that world may contain, new or not.
Relating it back to Crutchfield's computational mechanics, one thing a
critical rationalist might do is design an experiment that _constructs_
a mechanism-phenomenon that seems to always work. Whether or not, the
first time that scientist constructed that thing, the
mechanism-phenomenon never before existed in the universe, we'll never
know, nor can we know. Those questions are metaphysical, spiritual,
philosophical. What we _can_ know, however, is that every time we go
through the same motions that guy went through, we get the same result.
So, again, I have to argue against naive realism and assert that
questions like this ("Is anything really 'new') are useless and their
answers don't matter except in the spiritual, metaphysical sense. If it
makes you a better cook or truck driver to believe one way or the other,
fine. But attempts to accurately transfer these unscientific beliefs to
other humans will always fail (and thank the gods for the interesting
ways in which they fail!), because only actions transfer.
Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-10-29 10:49 PM:
> 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.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
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