On Feb 2, 2008 :
Question: Each of your fascinating papers is even more thought provoking than the one before. But, as you found at your last BRI seminar, people see cognitive thermodynamics as presently defined to be so all-encompassing as to be vacuous.
Malcolm Dean: The only way people can come to this conclusion is through pervasive ignorance of the subject. It is to say that physics is objectionable because it is all-encompassing.
Question: Can’t you overcome the objections by recasting cognitive thermodynamics in terms of probability collectives?
Malcolm Dean: Possibly you are still thinking of CT as a limited local theory
applied to human communications, media theory, or psychology. While CT
does have applications in these areas, supported by many gigabytes of
research papers, the difference is that while some people attending
the BRI seminar still appear to believe in human uniqueness and the
brain as an isolated object, I study their dialog, as well as the
brain and cognition, from the view that the human brain and mind are
simply instances of cognitive thermodynamic systems. Cultures,
religious systems, and economies also follow exactly the same laws.
I am asking much more fundamental questions, rooted in philosophical
schools such as the Greek Ionians, early Buddhist phenomenology,
Radical Constructivism, and the scientific tradition of the Santa Fe
Institute. Cognitive and neuroscience theories and models are not
required to have universal applicability, but in CT, universality and
scalability is an absolute requirement, along with its expressibility
in plain language.
I am exploring collective models (including as Szuba’s Computational
Collective Intelligence, and Minati’s Collective Beings), but many of
them perpetuate Rational Mind, Game Theory, or some other economic
theory based on the heritage of Gaussian statistics and the
Enlightenment conception of the Cartesian individual. One must be
aware that many contemporary models and methods still have one foot in
the 19th century. They are forms of statistical reductionism which
will be left behind as our computational power reaches new and very
different regimes of statistical realism.
Emergence and Complexity are rooted in much newer models such as Power
Laws, Minimum Entropy, and Maximum Entropy, which are emergent
thermodynamic phenomena in any complex system, at any scale. CT is
based on Wheeler’s paper “Law without laws,” in which he sees the
entire universe and its contents as emergent Observer-participat ory
processes, including the basic “laws” of physics. This is the
fundamental process of Information, from which the universe follows in
a thermodynamic cascade.
It is that dreaded object, a theory of everything.
Malcolm
–
Malcolm Dean
Los Angeles CA
323-876-8559
malcolmdean- at-gmail. com
Recent Lectures/Publicatio ns:
“Cognition in Materiality, ” UCI HSC, January 12, 2008
“From Cosmogenesis to Extended Cognition,” UCLA HCS, November 7, 2007
“Exorcising Entropy,” SCTPLS, Orange, July 29, 2007
“Hitchhiker’ s Guide to (Cognitive) Thermodynamics, ” UCLA BRI, May 21, 2007
“Theology of Information, ” EOR, Hawaii, January 5, 2007
“Outline of Cognitive Thermodynamics, ” SCTPLS, Denver, August 5, 2005
“Cognitive Thermodynamics in Culture & Religion,” SSSR, Kansas City,
Oct 22, 2004
“General Theory of Cognitive Systems,” UCLA BRI, May 13, 2004
http://www.com. washington. edu/rccs/ bookinfo. asp?ReviewID= 288&BookID=232
Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed, April 8, 2004
DesktopLinux. com, O’Reilly.com
www.oreillynet. com/pub/au/ 228
Former News Editor, Maximum Linux, XML Journal
Former Principal Editor, Academic Computing, UCLA
Finally! A theory so stupid that a wallabee could have invented it!
Melba! Wallabies aren’t that stupid! Stop being mean!
CT is indeed all encompassing just as the first and second laws of thermodynamics are all encompassing laws. To do the work of making sense there must be an input of cognitive energy. so, an expression impresses upon the sensemaker. The exhaust is misunderstanding.