http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Crutchfield-s-Is-anything-ever-new-tp3917261p3922586.html
I believe, that anyone who has played jazz, in any of its forms, could
easily say yes. Those who have not played jazz, but have imagined
themselves doing so, might say no.
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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