[From Bill Powers (920925.0900)]
On Sunday morning (920927), Mary and I are taking off for a camping
trip into Arizona and New Mexico. We're going to look at the Very
Large Array and one radio telescope in the Very Long Baseline Array
(west of Soccorro on the Plains of Agustin), then go sideways to
another campground east of Socorro, then zoom up to Carrizoso and buy
some extraordinary apples they grow there, then maybe (if we're not
too bushed) down to Las Cruces for a sentimental look at the
observatory I designed way back when, and home. Four or five days,
prolly. When I disappear from the net, don't worry.
Avery Andrews (920925.1236) --
Thanks for Harnad's note on intelligence. Nothing for me to argue with
there!
Apropos of that, how many people have read Krishnamurti? This was a
wise fellow. To give you an idea (as near as I remember the facts): he
was raised by the Theosophists to be the Messiah because of his
extraordinary intelligence and spiritual development. When he was 17
years old, he was brought before a great international meeting to be
declared the saviour of the world or something, and he stood up and
say "Sorry, folks, I think there's been some misunderstanding -- thank
you very much, but no thanks." He spent most of the rest of his life
talking with people who wanted to ask him about things. He never wrote
anything, but his conversations have been recorded in books. My copies
are still packed, so no refs.
In one conversation, he was being asked about intelligence -- what
makes some people more intelligent than others, how can I be
intelligent, and so on. He said, these questions have no meaning.
Intelligence is not a quantity. It's unique. To be human is to be an
intelligent being. So relax.
I thought Penni would like that. I put this in a reply to you because
you said "intelligence" and that stimulated me to respond in this way.
ยทยทยท
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Greg and Pat Williams (920925) --
Good. Handsomely said. Now let's give up the idea that anything at all
must have purposeful influence on organisms, and begin working out
whether it does or not, without caring how the investigation turns
out. Without staking out a position and defending it.
I'm starting a summary of basic principles and their application to
the shaping of behavior. When it gets far enough along I'll post it
for revisions, additions, corrections, and deletions. This is strictly
an attempt to lay out what we can derive from HPCT as it stands, not
an attempt to justify HPCT. I'm not ruling out conjecture, but am
trying to eliminate anything that's obviously false as seen from in
here. The objective is to arrive at a scenario for human development
that a True Believer in HPCT would find consistent with the theory. As
we find out what's wrong with this scenario, we may gain some insights
that will improve the model. All this may not get done until after the
camping trip.
The Arm is all fixed. I'm waiting for the permissions to put in the
day or so that will be needed to write up the detailed changes and
ship them to you. This is only because of busy-ness with the net and
other things, and the fact that I need a break.
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Chuck Tucker (920925) --
Thanks for the writeups on the RB and Coin experiments. Clark McPhail
sent me, some time ago, copies of his students' lab reports on similar
assignments, and they were fascinating. Maybe you could post exerpts
from the results you get. I think this is a beautiful example of how
people make sense of PCT when they're presented with a problem to
solve by using it.
Maybe in our attempts to publish in the conventional literature we
should focus on describing phenomena that only PCT can explain, and
then explaining them. As several people have been pointing out, it
doesn't seem to work when we use PCT to explain things that others
think they can already explain. Maybe we should start presenting them
with things they can't explain.
A thought about the coin game. An extremely difficult pattern to guess
would "All the coins exactly where they are and oriented as they are."
The experimenter would never get a "no error" response! It seems to me
that the pattern must contain at least one dimension in which it's NOT
controlled in order to give the experimenter enough hints.
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Oded Maler (920925) --
I think, I hope, that your posting of the description of Larsonian
Physics was intended as an admonition: DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO
CONTROL THEORY!
The observatory where I worked in the 60s was a magnet for papers like
this; for some reason, people seem to think that astronomers have a
special interest in revolutionary ideas, perhaps because of
misinterpreting the title of Copernicus' _De Revolutionibus_. So we
got every nutty new idea in the world sent to us. For years, being a
revolutionary myself, I conscientiously studied the materials and
wrote back what I thought of them, because who knows? Maybe someone
really had something new. But it was all sad garbage in the end, a
result of a sort of cargo cult approach to science (imitate the
outward trappings while missing the point altogether). I think that I
probably saw some of Larson's stuff, probably indirectly. Don't
remember now.
Reading that stuff at the observatory was good for me, because it made
me realize how easily I could cross the line, too, and start ranting
and raving and sounding like a madman. It made me sympathize more with
people in the conventional branches of psychology who came across my
work and found it just as strange as I found all the new theories of
electrical vortex gravitation, tachyon generators, hollow earths,
space visitors in the White House, particle physics, and health
radiation resonators. If you want to know how a new idea looks to
others, insert it in the middle of a list like that and see what
impression it gives.
What I've found in common among all the writings like this is an utter
lack of self-criticism. It never occurs to the author of such a work
that the insights which thrilled the soul at three o'clock in the
morning might collapse the next day, given any sort of judicial
review. Everything that sounds plausible gets written down and
elaborated on -- "But that means .... and that means ... holy smokes,
and that means ..." The person gets caught up in a great manic wave of
optimism that simply brushes aside all mundane considerations like
experimental proof or internal consistency.
Even when experiments are done, they're done in tremendous haste and
with absolute certainty that they will bear out the theory. So of
course if there are difficulties, as there always are, they are
attributed to everything BUT the theory -- we need better bearings, we
need a more powerful Van de Graf generator, we need to balance the
weights more exactly, we need to build the whole thing LOTS bigger, we
need more subjects, and so on. In a lot of cases, when gadgets are
actually built, the inventor is tempted into just a little cheating
and misrepresenting and abracadabra, because he sincerely believes
that if he can just raise enough money to improve the apparatus, it
really will work, so he's really not cheating or lying, not in the
long run. All those investors will get their money back BILLIONS AND
BILLIONS of times over. So the manic rush leads to fraud, without any
evil intent at all. Just ignorance of how the search for knowledge
really has to work, with a healthy dose of greed and a longing for
fame.
I should think that any honest scientist trying to promote a new idea
would feel a little uncomfortable reading that last paragraph.
Even now, I get guilty twinges at stuffing things like Larson's theory
into the wastebasket. What if he's really on to something? What a
horrible injustice, to dismiss him just because he and his supporters
write like opinionated nuts and can't spell Reagan! What if people did
that to my ideas?
But there it goes, plop. I can't be that open-minded any more. At
least I can try not to do the same things when I get brilliant ideas
at three o'clock in the morning.
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Best to all,
Bill P.