[K.Kahn:]
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.
[M.Guzdial:]
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.
[J.Balzano:]
Perhaps a brief textual summary of the arguments, and maybe a pointer to the evidence?
Allow me to bug Mark again for what the "lot more empirical evidence in his [Simon's] favor" he's referring to. I took down my copy of Simon's "Sciences of the Artificial" book (first edition, from my grad student days), where in Ch.2 on "The Psychology of Thinking", Simon says in his Conclusion that "the evidence is overwhelming that the system is basically serial in its operation", but paging through the chapter I find very little evidence at all, much less anything that could be considered "overwhelming"! And even if I'm missing something here, the fact remains that Simon is talking in this chapter about how people do solo problem-solving like the famous cryptarithmetic problem "DONALD+GERALD=ROBERT". This is a very different context from that of (a) people's (mental) models of how the world works (as I think Andres V points out), or for that matter (b) how they would even do GOFPS (good old fashioned problem-solving) in a distributed, multi-agent situation.
-Jerry B
------------------------- 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