Better than WIMSATT?
OK, OK. I'll read the article.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
- Original Message -
From: Russ Abbott
To:
Reuben Hersh, rhe...@gmail.com,
but you probably think of him as a mathematician.
On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:15 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
I am talking about real live philosophers, right here in santa fe.
Anybody know any?
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
On Apr 28, 2009, at 8:51 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
On Apr 28, 2009, at 8:31 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
I wish the hell some you smart folks were reading this book with me:
Bedau and Humphreys, EMERGENCE. MIT 2008.
Does anybody know a good philosopher or two with time on their hands?
Just
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 10:45:48PM -0700, Russ Abbott wrote:
Unless you can tell me why I'm wrong, I will continue to claim that I've
solved the problems of emergence and reductionism in The reductionist blind
spot http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/4540/. (Yes, it's an
audacious
Just my two cents-ontology, epistemology and emergence are certainly
not mutually exclusive at all:
www.cognitive-edge.com
--Russ
On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:58 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
Owen Densmore wrote:
Does anybody know a good philosopher or two with time on their
hands?
Just out of
Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 04/28/2009 08:33 PM:
let a, b, and c
constitute macro-entity E and let the behavior of E. be controled by the
properties and intereactions of a, b and c. Now, let one of the behaviors
of E to control the behavior of a, b, or c. Is there a problem here?
Yes, tenure helps. If you're pursuing really strange paths, with a
high probability of failure (but a big payoff if they work) tenure
helps. One example jumps to mind: Lotfi Zadeh says he could never have
worked on fuzzy logic if he hadn't already got tenure. It took both
intellectual and
On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:46 PM, Tom Johnson wrote:
Owen:
For me, the best thing about tenure was that it allowed me to take
up to two years of unpaid-leave whenever I wanted, safe in the
knowledge that my job (with fine retirement and health bennies)
would be there when I came back.
Well, not to go on, but:
- Wouldn't most of the problems tenure solves be solved by variations
on the 20% theme: You have 20% of your time to be exploring research
that is not on your main deliverable path? Google does this. Xerox
too. Ditto SunLabs. And any savvy engineer/researcher
As a practicing mathematician, my understanding is that it is permissible to
define anything by a property if and only if you can prove there exists a
unique thing with that property.
For example, you cannot define sqrt(49) as an integer whose square is 49
since there are two such integers.
Russ Standish wrote __
Can somebody remind me what are the supposed problems with emergence and
reductionism?
Russ, I will do my best but you have to promise not to growl at me when I
get it wrong.
Two problems, closely related:
(1) Self Cause; (2) Downward Causation
It is one of those
After poking about a bit in the Emergence realm, I find I enjoy Miller/
Page's discussion, mainly because it summarizes the puzzle and puts it
into perspective. And I like their prose.
Basically, its the wide domain of local interactions (at a micro
level) producing a global behavior
John: So circular definitions are permissible if and only if you can show
there is a unique pair with the given relation.
ThatÂ’s very interesting. How do you prove you have a unique pair? Do you
know an example of such a circular definition that is popular or obvious?
For example, I would
Thus spake John Kennison circa 04/29/2009 08:02 AM:
As a practicing mathematician, my understanding is that it is
permissible to define anything by a property if and only if you can
prove there exists a unique thing with that property. For example,
you cannot define sqrt(49) as an integer
Wot be Cognitive Vertigo But a discussion by people don't know the topic?
ANY triangle consisting of three joined members (wood or gold, and not
necessarily straight, or pinned) if supported on a base will resist any
load through any vertex. It is not particularly good at this and much less
Wot be Cognitive Vertigo But a discussion by people don't know the topic?
ANY triangle consisting of three joined members (wood or gold, and not
necessarily straight, or pinned) if supported on a base will resist any
load through any vertex. It is not particularly good at this and much less
some context
Education, especially higher education used to be considered a calling
(not unlike a religious calling) and the objective was wisdom and the
advancement of human knowledge. Access to the academy was closely
guarded and elitist.
K-12 education started moving away from this model in
A good description of this process of altering the American use of
information is laid out in 'The Metaphysical Club- a history of ideas
in America between the Civil War and WW1' by Louis Menand. Won the
Pulitzer.
Growing up abroad I was dismayed, returning to the US for college, to
note an
Hmmm! I had always thought that it was explanations that simplified; it never
occured to me that a definition was under any such obligation.
n
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)
Hi Russ. Could you say a bit more than just read the article?
For example, I'm not sure we're directly concerned with reductionism.
I see the connection, certainly, but defining emergence clearly,
offering a theorem based structure, classifying types of
emergence, ... is a big deal and
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 1:45 AM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote:
Sometimes it seems to me that people prefer to think of emergence as
mysterious. It's not.
I agree. That's generally the problem I have when folks start talking about
downward causation.
I had an interesting
To Owen: Here it is in a gross of words.
Since probably the beginning of science (and even before) we have tended to
think of higher level things as being composed of lower level things in a
way that allows us to link the lower level to the higher level. That's only
natural. Everything that has
Just a couple of brief comments . . .
From: some...@somewhere . . .
(Do you give
an undergraduate a major in Water? What are they then prepared
for?)
For what it's worth, the largest major on our campus is Liberal
Studies . . . I'll let you speculate on What they are then prepared
for
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