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 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


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