Posted by
Ted Carmichael on
Oct 30, 2009; 10:33pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Crutchfield-s-Is-anything-ever-new-tp3917261p3921815.html
Hi, Nick.
I'll have to read it more carefully, but on first blush I would say: not necessarily.
My tongue-in-cheek email was really a comment about scale. All computer programs, no matter how different, can be mapped at the most basic level to one type of binary value and three types of computer operations: the three basic logic gates. It is the particular number of these and their combination that make Word different from XP, which is different from Halo, etc.
These gates - one level higher - are combined into a 'grammar' that describes a low-level programming language, such as assembly. So the basic operations in a machine code are more varied and numerous than just three gates. The next jump in scale - perhaps a high-level programming language, such as Java - has an even larger grammar.
To address your question I would point out that the division between software and hardware (and firmware) is arbitrary, in terms of which scale is the delimiter. It's been decided based on what is most useful for manufacturing, etc. Likewise, the scale (grammar) of Java was chosen so that programmers could ignore everything below it, and write the same code on 'any' computer. This is similar in how we ignore the low-level stuff when writing a document, and just concentrate on the words and - to a lesser extent - the letters we use.
Two different database packages may have the exact same functionality at the scale that we care about, but "under the hood" are completely different ... say, if one was written for the Mac and one for a PC.
So to answer your question directly, I would have to know what scale Crutchfield uses to determine when something is new. Presumably, Windows 7 has two types of innovation: the functionality presented to the user is different, as well as the efficiencies in the underlying architecture. Windows XP was famous for using a different kernel than Vista, making it more robust and stable, in addition to the changes that the user could see.
But if Cruthfield goes down a level, he could claim that it isn't new at all since it uses the same, more fundamental, architecture of a PC's hardware, rather than a Mac's hardware, or some other configuration (grammar) of hardware.
In response to Glen's comments, I would say that his differentiation between thoughts and actions is also a somewhat arbitrary choice of scale. I agree that how two people shoot a basketball is usually more easily translated between them than how they calculate the product of two numbers. When I shoot a basketball, I follow the same general procedure (knees bent, one hand on the side of the ball and one hand behind it, etc) that other people do. But my physical structure is still different than another person's, so I have refined the general procedure to better match my physical structure. (Or not, since I usually miss the basket.)
Two different people calculating a product, however, may use two totally different methods. One person may even have a larger grammar for this, utilizing more methods for more types of numbers than the second person. (In effect, he has more of his brain dedicated to these types of tasks, which give him the power to have a larger "math" grammar.) So it's probably more precise to say: at a certain scale 'actions' can be mapped between two people but 'thoughts' cannot be.
If you go down to the lower level processes, all of our neurons behave in approximately the same ways. So at this scale they can be mapped, one person to another. I.e., when thinking, one of my neurons is just as easily mapped to one of your neurons as my actions are to your similar actions.
Anyway, as I said I'll have to read Crutchfield more carefully, to know exactly what he is complaining about. But I think it is interesting to point out the parallel between "emergence" and "innovation." A new emergent property can arise when the underlying elements are configured/connected in a new way. Likewise, something that is innovative can also be considered a new configuration of pieces we already had access to.
Cheers,
Ted
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson
<[hidden email]> wrote:
Ted,
If I understand Crutchfield arightly, he would not regard Windows 7 as something "new" since it is written on the same kind of "machine" as XP.
Do I understand him correctly?
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 10/30/2009 11:32:48 AM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Crutchfield 's "Is anything ever new?"
Have you seen all those commercials for Windows 7? Microsoft's "new" operating system?
It isn't new at all. Just the same old ones and zeros.
-Ted
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 2:15 AM, Russ Abbott
<[hidden email]> wrote:
This seems to me to be asking a version of the question whether one can ever think something for which one does not already have a word--i.e., whether one's language determines and limits one's possible thoughts.
I think that's wrong. A simple argument would be that if it were true then we would never have thought anything since we evolved from single cell organisms that had no language.
I tend to agree with Nick that most if not all of our new thoughts are combinations and mutations of existing thoughts. But that seems to be good enough.
Of course single celled organisms didn't have thoughts either. But how thought started is another question. I don't think it started with abstract concepts. How did we (animals) first manage to convert perceptions into concepts that could be stored and manipulated? To tell that story clearly would be a very nice bit of science. But it certainly happened.
-- Russ A
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 10:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson
<[hidden email]> 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
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org