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 <[email protected]> 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 < > [email protected]> 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, >> Clark University ([email protected]) >> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> >> >> >> >> >> >> ============================================================ >> 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 >> > > > ============================================================ > 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 >
============================================================ 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
