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