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 at 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 at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html