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