Greetings Economists, Ravi writes, i would use the example of the mathematician ramanujan, whose mathematical results were stupendous, but who neither cared for nor was good at proofs (leaving hardy to do the dirty work to establish his impressive results). his justification for the results he proposed were often based on his intuition or the claim that the goddess 'parasakthi' told him so, in a vision. i hate rehasing this issue, but i have to point out that scientists will be quick to point out that intuition is alright in the 'context of discovery' but what makes science 'science' is that rigorous proof is required in the 'context of justification'. this claim is quite a distance from reality. pkf among others points out the political - the desires of the humans carrying out the justification - and theoretical - theory-laden'ness of facts - limitations of of this 'context of justification' claim. --ravi
Doyle, We're talking about Neuro-networks not intuition. Whatever intuition is supposed to be in popular imagination it is pointless to go on about intuition when we have better ways to talk about what is going in someone's mind. Not that I will eschew saying the word intuition in this short essay, but that is we are going to be 'rigorous' we want to at least know that rigor requires using neuro-networks not poorly materially defined terms like intuition. Secondly let's consider rigorous proof as a form addressing the issue of memory recall. So if we want to know something we want to remember how to get there. That is part of the reason why a neuro-network is better than a linear sequential computing process. We assume the methods of pencil and paper mathematics (Erdos forgive us our transgressions against your mathematics!) in considering mathematics but the method of 'writing' mathematics can be quite un-like pencil and paper. Thirdly, it is necessary in my view to understand if we are going to refer to desires of human beings to understand how feelings are related to the neo-cortex. Hence why we might want to build computing networks that reflect context based files we exchange with each other. Hence why we want to remember something, and share the work of memory by talking to each other. This is simple to say. We walk around in the world, not sit in front of desktop computers, and when we are in the world such as Mother and children we want to see to it that the social structure insures we get our work done. That is a context based view of things. We use how we feel to tell us how to choose. Many a woman has argued that that sort of work is 'intuition' based because rigorous proof as a mathematical method of doing work is not and I repeat this as loudly as possible a practical means of implementing a relationship with a child. That techniques invented for mathematics in the world of pencil and paper is irrelevant to the complex immediate tasks for which neuro-networks have evolved to do work in. That describes the purpose of having augmented reality displays where we are in the world. We want something that comes up (from memory) when needed, not laboriously constructed by sequential rules of logic. That writing that context based information structure requires that all points have factorial structure to it in an n-dimensional way. Hence spintronics offers ways of addressing at once some powerful computational problems that can't be done logically and consistently otherwise. thanks, Doyle Saylor
