From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 22:36:31 MDT
Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
> >if I were to describe the foundation of
> >knowledge, I'd say it's a life raft of general intelligence and sensory
> >perception floating in a vast ocean of mystery. I wouldn't single out
either
> >element.
>
Nice one. Speaks to me in GodelEscherBachese. :-)
Damien Broderick wrote:
> Nicely expressed. This is how I put it in THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS:
> =======
> Is our joint, somewhat blurrily-shared universe fundamentally
> constructed
> by practices of discourse in which we are constituted, as
> postmodern theory
> claims? Or is there, after all, a fiercely resistant noumenon
> embedded like
> reinforcing bars through the wet-poured slabs of phenomenal
> appearance?
> While cognitive science aims to provide definitive answers strung like
> beads on a single intellectual catenary, what one finds is a skein of
> contestation within a multi-dimensional manifold. Consider
> the problem for
> which Kant's solution effectively closed the debate for a
> century: how we
> know anything at all. Kant argues that it is individual consciousness
> through which all we can ever know is given us. That consciousness is
> itself internally structured with categories and schemata, rules and
> images, stimulated into action by the strictly unknowable
> *Ding an sich*
> (or `things in themselves') of material reality.
> If the 20th century was marked by several versions of
> radical anti-Kantian
> mindlessness, most notably behaviorism - I mean this
> literally: it rejected
> the very concept of mind - a strikingly effective cognitive-empirical
> response came from Chomsky. As infants we seem much too
> easily learn the
> shape and articulation of both physical and social worlds, on
> too little
> evidence, for mind to be fresh-minted with each baby.
> While transcendental intuition of essences can no
> longer be regarded as an
> even remotely plausible explanation for the way we categorize
> the world and
> function within it, might it not be that mental symbols - coded as
> arbitrarily as any Saussurean might wish - crystallize on an
> innate grid?
> Impressive neurological evidence for this possibility is discussed by
> Jean-Pierre Changeux. For Jerry Fodor (whose theories guide
> neurophysiologist Changeux's anatomical investigations),
> `people are born
> with a full set of representations, onto which they can then
> map any new
> forms of information that happen to emerge from their
> experiences in the
> world' (Gardner's precis). If this is so, we parse the world
> according to
> the syntax of the language of thought.
> The immediate objection, no doubt, is to gaze
> incredulously at the
> uncurbed plenty of human culture - an easy task if, as I do,
> you live in a
> neighborhood where athletic women in brief garments jog past
> their faceless
> Muslim sisters each encased in something like a linen letterbox - and
> wonder if Fodor has had a restricted upbringing. But from the
> standpoint of
> cognitive research, the differences of mental structure
> between theologian
> Hans Kung and a !Kung San sorcerer are doubtless infinitely
> less compelling
> than the gap between the thought processes of human and
> chimpanzee, though
> we share more than 99 percent of our genetic coding with
> those ape-cousins.
> Yet alternative views continue to be pressed
> powerfully. For the late
> James J. Gibson and his empirical followers, Fodorian representational
> models are simply unnecessary. In Gardner's summary:
>
> "[O]rganisms are so constituted, and live in a world so
> constituted, that
> they will readily gain the information they need to survive
> and to thrive.
> In particular, our sense organs are designed to pick up
> information from
> the external world. [...T]here is no need to operate upon it
> or process it;
> there is no need to draw on prior knowledge, on mental models, on
> interpretive schemata."
>
> If the Gestalt school argued many decades ago that we see what we do
> because our biology makes us look for patterns, Gibson turned
> the tables
> and asserted that the densities of texture and gradient in
> the world, a
> world we move through at will, provide all the cues we need
> to thrive in
> it. In short, we are organisms adapted by evolution to this world. Its
> affordances - `potentialities for action inherent in object
> or scene' - are
> its meanings. `Invariance in the ambient optic array,' Gibson
> claimed, `is
> not constructed or deduced; it is there to be discovered.'
>
> ====================
>
> Damien Broderick
>
I tried to find a good place to <snip> but didn't have the heart.
Now I'm gonna have to buy that book too! :-( Dammit :-)
I love the Chomsky.
I can't go without throwing in something I thought of during lunch today,
which, believe it or not, is actually talking about the same thing from
another angle. I'm putting it in am AI mini-tome I'm writing at the moment.
"Insight is the serendipity born of failure to make a mistake"
Now someone else will tell me who originally said it!
oh well...
Colin Hales
*have I just failed to make a mistake?*
yippee, my 'new kind of science' just arrived!
Get in the "1000 years or less" queue Mr Broderick.
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