This story was used by Stephen Pinker in "How the Mind Works" as part of an attempt to reject the validity of Searle's Chinese Room argument against Strong AI. IIRC Pinker's point was that Searle's argument rests on a narrow definition of what it means to "understand", and he used this story to illustrate his argument that a broader view of concepts like "understanding" is required. Personally, I wasn't convinced but I liked the approach.
Yes and no. I am aware of the status of the field (well, AI less so). I myself am a psychologist working on the self-organization of behavior. Yes, we have been using examples like termites and ants for years. But we are far from the mainstream. For example, in Pinker's How the Mind Works, he dismisses self-organization as "fairy dust". Some aspects of our work have been trickling into the mainstream. But if you don't assume that the mechanisms of mind are computations on representations, then it is very difficult to get a job without compromising your principles. And perhaps you could…
From a layman's perspective I've yet to find a better understanding of psychology than what Steven Pinker posits in hist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works (1997), and even today it doesn't seem like the basic paradigm (the evolutionary constraints) has changed much.
Steven Pinker talks about art in one of his books. I believe it’s in “How the Mind Works” he splits art in to two rough categories: “Museum Art” and “Motel Art”. Motel Art might be a picture of a flower or a field. Museum art is things like Picasso and Rembrandt - what can be in a museum changes over time. E.g, if I paint a Picasso that would be passable in a motel, but not a museum. Picasso has been done. Doing it again is not museum art. That is, motel art is pretty to look at. Museum art is culturally and historically defined. A less favorable interpretation is that museum art is an…
What have I done this year? Wow... a lot and nothing, depending on how you look at it. It's been a weird year. But I guess the biggest thing is all the work I've put into the ScrewPile projects... ScrewPile [1] being a suite of open-source tools centered around knowledge management / information retrieval / search. As far as generic infrastructure stuff goes, I moved all the code to GitHub[2], moved the project website to Google Code, installed Bugzilla[3], wrote some blog entries[4], etc. On a more technical level, I wrote a modest amount of code for Neddick[5], opened a lot of bugs,…
Thanks for the recommendations. I've been wary of other books on evolution, even though the subject fascinates me, because I worry that they will be either repeating the same information (even the evolution bits of HTMW seemed repetitive since I read it immediately after TSG), or worse, dissecting creationist arguments. Dennett's book looks like it might be a good complement to TSG though, so I'll check it out. The Language Instinct is on my list too now. Thanks.
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford
Noah Shachtman gets a downmod for no research. We have some idea of what the components of the mind are now. We can relate all of the branches of mathematics and science to specific areas of function with an evolutionary basis. http://www.amazon.com/How-Mind-Works-Steven-Pinker/dp/039333...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works
You are completely mischaracterizing my comment. > Humans have a long list of cognitive shortcomings. We find them interesting and give them all sorts of names like cognitive dissonance or optical illusions. But we don't currently make silly conclusions like humans don't reason. Exactly! In fact, things like illusions are actually excellent windows into how the mind really works. Most visual illusions are a fundamental artifact of how the brain needs to turn a 2D image into a 3D, real-world model, and illusions give clues into how it does that, and how the contours of the natural world…