Greg Detre
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
what is smart?
you can solve a larger range of problems � you can only define smartness/intelligence in relative terms
clauses + causes � argues that the reason that there�s high-level commonality between languages (nouns, verbs, adjectives) is that they�re part of the basic thinking process you need to do anything
Minsky: why is it that almost all mathematicians are good at music, but most musicians aren�t good at maths?
how could you be bad at mathematics? how is it possible?
to do school maths, the amount of knowledge is very small
difficulty with abstraction?
we are just bad at rules
he tutored a student who didn�t understand parentheses � Minsky showed that they could be seen as the ends of nested ovals
math needs good visual memory?
Euclid does geometry, using arithmetic without numbers � how???
Skinner telling 500 grade school teachers that education is crap because they�re no good, thriving on their negative energy
he thinks Chomsky is a worse behaviourist than Skinner, because he never comes up with ideas about how we understand grammar, only describing it
understanding is having several descriptions
going a level below
except at the theoretical level (cf Deb)
elephants selling paintings � ganesh (6 year old) sold one for $2100 � titles like �wisdom from the forest�, �lines in the mind� � ouija board???
why is head hair so long???
straight dope � aquatic ape
potlatch � discussion between experts
theory that child prodigies had a parent/family who paid an enormous amount of attention to them, and were kept away from other children most of the time � mccurdy??? in an old issue of a horizon magazine
lavoisier realised that sulphur dioxide must be a different chemical from sulphur, because sulphur doesn�t smell
are there things that people ought to be able to learn, but we just can�t?
obvious performance vs competence
assimilation vs accommodation � food as metaphor
psychic energy
body as warring components
repression as sublimation
salome
On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age
thirty-seven, met Lou Salom�a twenty-one-year-old Russian woman who was
studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He soon fell in love with her, and
offered his hand in marriage. She declined, and the future of Nietzsche�s
friendship with her and Paul R�appears to have suffered as a consequence. In
the years to follow, Salom�ould become an associate of Sigmund Freud, and
would write with psychological insight of her association with Nietzsche.
"Body am I, and
soul"--thus speaks the child. And why should one not speak like children?
But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and
soul is only a word for something about the body. The body is a great reason, a
plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. An
instrument of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call
"spirit"--a little instrument and toy of your great reason. . . .
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an
unknown sage--whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body.
There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. [Kauffman
translation, 1954, p.146]
�In our own wild nature we find the best recreation from our un-nature, from our spirituality.�
�I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.�
do you believe in hypnosis???
how does it
generate new Critics???
why do we make mistakes???
how would you represent predicate calculus in a society of mind???
refce:
dyre �
built frames out of a connectionist sys
feldman
(at berkley, with lakoff) � structured connectionism
check
out Fuster at Steve�s site