We should also mention George Miller, and our special inspiration 
over the years: Jerome Bruner. Bruner especially seemed to have a 
great balance of insight, experimental rigor, and a certain modesty 
about what he claimed that made his work extremely useful.

I knew Herb and Alan (Newell) pretty well, and always felt they were 
trying to force beliefs of theirs into more "scientific"and 
"respectable" forms. I don't think they made it.

>(Sometimes people feel this limitation: they want to say so many
>things, but can only pronounce it linear sentence after sentence..)

That's what polyphony on a keyboard is partly about -- to allow one's 
multiple parallel thoughts to be expressed in parallel. It is more 
difficult in normal language, but that is partly what humor and wit 
is for: to express ideas in more than one context at once.

Cheers,

Alan

-----

At 2:25 PM +0200 10/27/01, G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl wrote:
>Bring it on another track:
>
>The biggest contribution of Simon to the local American research of
>psychology was that he stood up in the glory days of Behaviorism that said:
>"Scientifically speaking A Human is a blackbox, you may only say something
>about the things you se, input and output. All the rest is speculation."
>(In other countries there were earlier alternatives developed, but these
>were not yet translated in English in these days.)
>Herbert Simon started to model the internal processes between these stimuli
>and responses: to call it more precise, "the manipulation of symbolic
>structures inside the human nerv system."
>Over the years it became a very complex information processing model:
>
>Nowadays we believe that in the human nerv system (not only on brain level!)
>lots of processes are running in concurrency. It is not clear how or even IF
>this is central coordinated..
>
>Some of these processes have serial subprocesses, like the speech-producing
>process (which is located in the left hemisphere for 95% of the people..),
>but that does not mean that all the other parts of that process are also
>serial... (Sometimes people feel this limitation: they want to say so many
>things, but can only pronounce it linear sentence after sentence..)
>
>
>The same for reading: Common sense makes you think that this process is also
>serial: someone reads a text letter by letter, assembles these to words,
>forms words to sentences etc.
>Wrong: for example: you do not read a sentence word by word. A very simple
>and elegant model to show this is the triangle figure with text in it people
>use in Holland:
>
>              *
>             * *
>            *   *
>           *     *
>          * this  *
>         * is the  *
>        * the begin *
>       *             *
>      *****************
>
>Still how clumsy this triangle is created in ascii, lots of you do not see
>the "doubling of THE" , If you were really reading word by word you would
>have...
>
>To go deeper:
>While you did read this, you maybe did move your head a little, because you
>heard a noise.
>If you do this with a camera in front of your eye (not the newest models
>with movement-corection-processors in it..), the movie would make you feel a
>little sea sick, but now somewhere in your system it is registrated that
>your head moves, it corrects the processing of the image in such a way that
>the text stays in place (.. while your eye muscles keep your eye on the text
>and another eyemuscle-set keeps the text in focus and..)
>
>By the way, how did you knew this was a text in a triangle, something you
>can read?
>Only for this image-recognition part Stephan Kosslyn (Harvard) proposed a
>model with at least 15 subsystems in 1987.
>
>Another question, how did you knew this triangle text was in English? Didn't
>I say that is was used in Holland. Somewhere you have a complex set of
>background information you mobelize during reading this.. (Metadata-labels,
>email-discourse-expectations etc.)
>
>Point that I want to make is that the more you study these processes of
>thinking, learning, problem solving etc, the more you get convinced how
>complex and flexible the real thinking is even already in a child: they also
>have expectations about discourse and problemspaces they are suppost to live
>in: lets show it to you in a joke I did refer to earlier:
>Ask a child that just learns arithmitic: "How much is 3 Mellons and 2
>Mellons?" You will get the answer 5. If you then ask: "How much is 3 Million
>and 2 Million? they will say "I don tot know"
>(Repeat again and again these two questions, the answers will not change...)
>
>Summarizing: thinking and problem solving in children of all ages is more
>complex then we mostly suppose. Respect that and try to concentrate on what
>they normally are not that good in: donig it in a systematic approach. So
>develop problem-tackling-organisers that DO NOT KIll this flexible behavior.
>I remember from the dyas of Logo that this same problem of unorganized
>behavior was mentioned and there were project-books developed:
>
>On every page:
>1. what will I try to do today?
>2. What did i really try today?
>3. What will I try tomorrow?
>etc.. (was it on the MIT / LOGO site?
>
>For Squeak the same question: what kind of organizers can we develop for
>differnt levels?
>
>
>
>
>>  -----Original Message-----
>>  From: Mark van Gulik [mailto:ghoul6 at home.com]
>>  Sent: zaterdag 27 oktober 2001 9:36
>>  To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>>  Subject: Re: Lots of concurrency
>>
>>
>>  ...and it turned muh peanut butter sandwich intuh tuna-fish!!
>>  [for entertainment only]...
>>  Some people will believe anything.
>>
>>
>>  On Friday, October 26, 2001, at 09:50 pm, Gary McGovern wrote:
>>
>>  >
>>  > ----- Original Message -----
>>  > From: "Justin Walsh" <jwalsh at bigpond.net.au>
>>  > To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>>  > Cc: <g.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl>
>>  > Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 8:41 PM
>>  > Subject: Re: Lots of concurrency
>>  >
>>  >
>>  >
>>  >> Please study the whole expression again from the "point of
>>  >> view" of the
>>  > "I"
>>  >> that is doing the thinking.
>>  >
>>  > He he Justin,
>>  > I cannot resist also.
>>  > Do you know that some oriental sages are reputed to be able to
>>  > divide their
>>  > "I" into multiple seperate points of view. Some call it
>>  > schizophrenia but
>>  > that would most likely be true if it were out of control.
>>  >
>>  > Sound familiar ??? :-).
>>  > That would be powerful thought.
>>  >
>>  > Regards,
>>  > Gary
>>  >
>>  >
>>  >
>>  >
>>
>>
>>


--