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,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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