I've been urging more people to read Stephenson's Quicksilver, for
some sense of how new theories are embedded in historical context. The
first of many fine pithy quotes from the book,
Those who assume hypotheses as first principles
of their specualtions...may indeed form an
Can we describe the mind as a society of agents?
Marvin Minsky has written a book about the topic, and
Steven Pinker speculates about it in How the Mind
works. How would the basic emotions we pain/displeasure
and joy/pleasure look like? How does self-consciousness
fit into this picture?
I have
You refer to a period of self-organizing criticality as if that were an
observable thing, whereas it appears to me to be a statistical concept for a
set of chaotic equations. Part of what that model leaves out is the
conserved processes of development that complex systems display, and how
they
Phil,
Tell a skier that to an avalanche is just a statistical concept, or Ising or
Potts fields to a physicist.
SOC is the way most electronics work, SCR's and thus TRIAC's, Josephson
junctions, and lasers. Lasers are my favorite example - SOC of light.
I'm not sure the above fall into Hail
Carl, Jack,
Carl Tollander wrote:
That said, I like theory anyhow, but in order to approach any of these
TOE's, I've found that it helps to seek some understanding of their
historical context (such as from the math and physics community blogs
we've referred to elsewhere). I found some of
The very first paper I published - too many years ago - in AI Magazine,
then the flagship of the AI publication world - was a two part article,
first part critiquing the prevailing computational falsework (a
framework erected around a bridge to support it while concrete is being
poured), the
Ken,
Right. I'm quite comfortable discussing it from the observed physical
phenomena. If you watch individual physical events develop what I think you
quickly discover are developmental processes that statistical models can't
duplicate. Nature does not actually work by 'cause and effect'
The July 28 2008 issue of the New Yorker contains an article titled The
Eureka Hunt: Why Do Good Ideas Come To Us When They Do. See
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_lehrer for
an abstract.
Although the article talks about human insight I think it touches on
human
Nice tv conversation between Sabine Hossenfelder
(backreaction.blogspot.com) and Peter Woit (Not Even Wrong --
www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress) on physics and institute funding.
Not actually about string theory, but really seems to be about how
fields develop and get funded, maybe
Sorry, as usual, I buggered my question:
Does anybody know who it was or from what point of view they were speaking
when they referred to mathematics as neutral between idealism and realism
n
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([EMAIL
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