[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 at ucsd.edu