But Herb didn't play Bach on the pipe organ *or* think about what he was doing when driving a car, or even just walking and talking and looking and feeling .... his intellect was "amazing" (in a very special sense of that word)...
Cheers,
Alan
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At 9:46 PM -0400 10/25/01, Mark Guzdial wrote:
As far as I know, Herb Simon didn't argue about naturalness of parallelism in programming languages. Herb Simon was one of the pioneers of cognitive science, and he argued that the mind was single-threaded. (Simon was also one of the most amazing intellects of our time -- a Nobel prize winner in Economics and a Turing Award winner in computer science)
Mark
Fascinating and important questions being debated in this thread; I just wanted to ask Mark (or anyone else who knows) what the Herb Simon arguments and evidence in opposition to the "naturalness" of parallelism/concurrency in programming languages he was referring to. Perhaps a brief textual summary of the arguments, and maybe a pointer to the evidence?
- Jerry Balzano
At 10:38 AM -0700 10/25/01, Mark Guzdial wrote:
We're getting into some of my favorite literature, so I wanted to jump in here.
And I think it is just an illusion that this parallelism is only at a low level (e.g. neurons). Read Minsky's Society Theory of Mind ( http://www.media.mit.edu/people/minsky/ ) for example.
But also consider Herb Simon's arguments in opposition -- and Simon has a lot more empirical evidence in his favor. I don't have an opinion on which is right yet, but I don't think that this is a settled point.
Dr. Gerald J. Balzano Teacher Education Program Dept of Music Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition Cognitive Science Program UC San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093 (619) 822-0092 gjbalzano@ucsd.edu
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies. Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/ (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial@cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html