Silence Breaking

It's been a bit, and the lack of attention has been more a product of laziness then things to say. Sometime in this upcoming week I plan to sit down and start doing article by article responses to the collection of Metamagical Thema essays. Not every article. Just the ones that happened to strike me as worthwhile to remind myself of later. Or that were interesting. Or just because I happened to have a pen and index card that I made use of while reading some. For now though, I thought it might be nice to set down a few things that are indicative of where my whole cognitive science/AI interests are taking me.

Parallelization - From Chomsky and Pinker, there seem to be a number of elements related to language that are driven by a parallelization of the process. Both verbal and written elements of language are received as a serial feed, but parsing is done at a level that looks at the component parts in parallel and establishes meaning from the whole. I think that the mechanism is more integral to thought in general. I can't recall Hofstadter making an explicit statement of this, but it seems implied in the analogies that he makes.

Epiphenomena - A word picked up from one of the more recent (personally, not historically) articles read. Epiphenomena are emergent macro level behaviours from micro level phenomena. Which leads into the next bit.

Complexity - I just bought a book by Melanie Mitchell (a professor at Portland State University, and former student of Hofstadter) on Complex Systems. The idea here is the study of complex behaviors arising out of simple rules. Insect colonies, the economy, traffic jams, weather. All would fall into this field to some degree. I'll see what kind of taste this leaves when I get into the book.

Theory of Computation - I really want to dig more into Theory of Computation stuff. One of the classes that I regret not being able to take while I was at UPS.

Symbols and Representation - Encoding and decoding meaning. You are on a computer now. Everything that you are seeing is the result of 1s and 0s (on/off). Layers upon layers of abstraction bring us color, words, images, etc... And further, anything could potentially be used to represent any other thing. Morse code is another binary system wherein letters are represented by short and long beeps.

And the list could likely go on.