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Do software-generated "connections" really generate inspiration?
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Posted by Manfred
Oct 26, 2007 at 09:36 PM
“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.”
I would not want to dispute that the doctrine of connectionism does not require that making connections feels like making connection. But from the fact that making connections does not HAVE TO feel like thinking it does not follow that it CAN and often DOES go hand in hand with a conscious effort that characterizes thinking.
Nor would I disagree with the claim that some of the more durable connections are formed by understanding the material. In fact, that is one was one of the points I wanted to make. Making connections carefully and with consideration is or can be a form of trying to understand the material or a form of thinking.
Nor am I sure that making connections between two pieces of writing is simply “a physical act.” It involves physical acts (like typing on a keyboard), but it is more than that. Indeed, it should have been clear from things I said in other contexts that whatever kind of act it is, it belongs to writing (or thinking) about the matter at hand. There are occasions when [y]ou create a link and find that there is a topic with that name already and it has connections to other interesting topics, which show that you have thought about the matter before—often in an entirely different context.” That is very much like the “strategy is to write about the relationships; to try to discover them by thinking about the subject on paper by writing paragraphs”—with the exception that it does not happen on paper but on the screen.
So where is the disagreement.
I am just as much interested in meaningful connections as the next person, even though I used flash cards to learn the vocabulary of some ancient languages (most of which I have forgotten).
Manfred
Posted by Manfred
Oct 26, 2007 at 09:39 PM
Sorry, I made two mistakes that need fixing:
“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.”
I would not want to dispute that the doctrine of connectionism does not require that making connections feels like making connection. But from the fact that making connections does not HAVE TO feel like thinking it does not follow that it is false to say that it CAN and often DOES go hand in hand with a conscious effort that characterizes thinking. And that’s all I wanted to say.
Nor would I disagree with the claim that some of the more durable connections are formed by understanding the material. In fact, that is one was one of the points I wanted to make. Making connections (carefully and with consideration) is a form of trying to understand the material or a form of thinking.
Nor am I sure that making connections between two pieces of writing is simply “a physical act.” It involves physical acts (like typing on a keyboard), but it is more than that. Indeed, it should have been clear from things I said in other contexts that whatever kind of act it is, it belongs to writing (or thinking) about the matter at hand. There are occasions when [y]ou create a link and find that there is a topic with that name already and it has connections to other interesting topics, which show that you have thought about the matter before—often in an entirely different context.” That is very much like the “strategy is to write about the relationships; to try to discover them by thinking about the subject on paper by writing paragraphs“—with the exception that it does not happen on paper but on the screen.
So where is the disagreement.
I am just as much interested in meaningful connections as the next person, even though I used flash cards to learn the vocabulary of some ancient languages (most of which I have forgotten).
Manfred
Posted by Cassius
Oct 27, 2007 at 02:23 AM
One needs to be careful in distinguishing different types of “connections.”
Addition and multiplication tables, when memorized, form a type of connection within the brain: 7 X 8 is connected to 56 and 7+8 is connected to 15. My son, when young and perhaps even now, could not internalize [memorize] these connections, yet he completely understood the processes, including long division and could do them on his fingers or by counting holes in a ceiling tile, etc.
Understanding may and often does enhance memory, but not always.
-c
Posted by Manfred
Oct 27, 2007 at 12:41 PM
I don’t want to “whip a dead horse,” so this is my last post on this.
First, it was probably a bad idea to post last night after a full day’s of work. There are some more typos in my message. The most important one in this sentence: “But from the fact that making connections does not HAVE TO feel like thinking it does not follow that it is false to say that it CAN and often DOES go hand in hand with a conscious effort that characterizes thinking. And that’s all I wanted to say.” The first “thinking” should be “linking.”
Secondly, with regard to to some of the last comments. If you want a full account of “linking” or “thinking” you need to make a lot of distinctions, of course. But my aim was not to offer a full theory of linking or thinking. I made what I took (and take) to be an uncontroversial claim:
(i) conscious thinking is characterized (at least in part) by efforts to make connections between different bits of informations, ideas, or thoughts.
I concluded from this:
(ii) Therefore, consciously making wiki or hyperlinks between different topics or documents represents a form of thinking (and one that I find useful as one of the first steps in dealing with any kind of subject).
I neither claimed that it was the only kind of thinking nor that it represents a priviliged form of thinking.
That’s all, folks ...
Oh ... E. M. Forster comes to mind as an afterthought: ““Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” But that is an entirely different matter!
Posted by Chris Thompson
Oct 27, 2007 at 03:49 PM
I’ve never had a flash of insight prompted by “connections” made from off-the-shelf software. On the other hand, I’ve had some good insights from statistical analysis and machine learning algorithms used in a research context.
I think the main issue is that most off-the-shelf software automated connection algorithms are fairly simplistic. For the most part, they all run either classification algorithms or clustering algorithms. You don’t, for example, find outliner-style programs that do decision tree induction or principal component analysis. Not in an easy way anyway. Even classification is underused.
—Chris