If one is actually playing *music* when playing Bach on the pipe organ, than one is indeed thinking deeply about all the parts at once, how they intertwine and what they might "mean", both separately and in combination. Same when one is improvising in counterpoint. Same, if one is sight reading and trying to have real music flow out. I'm afraid that one really does think about these in parallel combination (as I said, very much like watching a theatrical production with multiple actors on the stage, but sonically). It's learnable, and lots of people have learned how. I believe that many advanced thinking "skills" have quite a bit in common with all this. You can learn how to have multiple "thinkers" working on different aspects of ideas, all together.
Cheers,
Alan
---- At 11:05 PM +0000 10/28/01, Gary McGovern wrote:
Hello Alan, I have to pull you up on something here. A person playing keyboard, driving a car and so on doesn't always think about what they are doing. Often it is trained into the body or mind or whatever through repetition and practice and maybe in a linear fashion. Regards, Gary
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Kay" Alan.Kay@squeakland.org To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 4:13 AM Subject: RE: Lots of concurrency
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
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
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