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Do software-generated "connections" really generate inspiration?
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Posted by Cassius
Oct 25, 2007 at 10:56 PM
Manfred,
It was your mention of the modeling of thinking as a neural net that led me to comment about the physical process of thinking, and to think about modeling thinking.
By the way, here is a useful quote by the statistician George Box, son-in-law of the very famous statistician Fisher:
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
-c
Posted by Manfred
Oct 25, 2007 at 11:57 PM
Cassius.
O.K. As I said I did not want to get too deeply into these issues. But what was behind my cliam was only that some people claim that you can model brain activities or connections between synapses etc. using connections between different bits and bytes, and thus also the corresponding “thoughts, concepts or words” in what we call “mind” with “statements, concepts and words” in the “software.” If we call the first “level 1” and the other “level 2,” I only really meant to talk about level 2.
I am just as skeptical as you seem to be about whether we can actually identify something that goes on at level 1 with what is going on at level 2. (Models are problematic.) But I also think that this question is irrelevant when we worry about how the ideas or words and connections we have stored in some software application may help us in further thinking about these ideas.
I am sorry if I sounded irritated,
Manfred
Posted by Cassius
Oct 26, 2007 at 02:29 AM
Manfred, no not irritated (indeed,I don’t think you were); besides I tend not to notice such things, being more than irritating myself.
One thing I believe that we can all agree on: Storing information in a conveniently accessible and manipulable form is worthwhile, and some software helps us do this.
Indeed, isn’t that why we participate in this forum, along with the possibility that we enjoy “conversing” with other introspective people?
-c
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Oct 26, 2007 at 07:47 PM
I think the matter of levels of analysis deserves a little bit of belaboring. At least three distinct levels deserve mention: physiological, psychological, and phenomenological.
We’re all pretty clear on the distinction between physiological and the others. But psychological and phenomenological also needs distinguishing. An example. A psychological connectionist wants to learn a list of meaningful facts. As a psychological connectionist, the learner believes that he must strengthen the connections between the memory traces of these facts and the teacher’s command to produce them on paper. Does it follow that he should repeat the facts over and over again, to strengthen the connection between fact and command. Or does it even follow that he should practice with flash cards, learning to produce a fact in response to anticipated stimuli?
I don’t think so. The psychological doctrine of connectionism does not require that making connections _feel_ like making connections. It could well be that the richest and durable connections are formed by understanding the material as deeply as possible. One could give a psychological account of the process of connection even though the phenomenology of maximizing strength of connection doesn’t resemble the strengening of connections.
Similarly, it is important not to confuse the hypothetical psychology of “making connections” with the physical act of making linkages. It may be—as I suppose I contend—that to find connections, the best strategy is to write about the relationships; to try to discover them by thinking about the subject on paper by writing paragraphs.
In my personal experience, I have at time wasted hours looking at a diagram in the hope of seeing how matters are connected, when I found I could solve the problem by forgetting the diagram and writing about the relationships. Connecting things is certainly thinking. But the manner of establishing connection does not necessarily wear its nature on its sleeve.
Posted by Frederick Wahl
Oct 26, 2007 at 07:49 PM
>> Certainly we all have had the experience of reading something or hearing something which, along with our previous thoughts, resulted in an inspiration. But has anyone really had an inspiration as a result of a software-generated connection? <
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> Storing information in a conveniently accessible and manipulable form is worthwhile, and some software helps us do this. <<
Be it a book, webpage, forum, or software filter - regardless of the source, it is the person receiving and manipulating the information that has the “inspiration” which leads to further action.
One of the greatest skills I learned in school was computer programming. The study of algorithms, use of data structures, the debugging process, are all vital skills to have when thinking or problem solving - skills that lead to “inspiration”. Until the day we have a “Colossus” (as in the Forbin Project), our minds will be the greatest tool.