P h i l o s o p h y o f S c i e n c e C o l l o q u i u m
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest
Room 6.54 (6th floor) Monday 4:00 PM
Pazmany P. setany 1/A Budapest, Hungary
Phone/Fax: (36-1) 372 2924
http://hps.elte.hu/seminar
13 December 4:00 PM 6th floor 6.54
(Language: Hungarian)
T a m a s M a t o l c s i
Applied Analysis, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest
Mit mondanak a terido-modellek a fizikaban?
(What do space-time models tell for physics?)
Abstract: http://hps.elte.hu/seminar/2004/December/#2
___________________________________
The 60-minute lecture is followed by a 10-minute break. Then we hold a
30-60-minute discussion. The participants may comment on the talks and
are encouraged to initiate discussion through the Internet. The
comments should be written in the language of the presentation.
The organizer of the colloquium: Laszlo E. Szabo (email:
leszabo(a)hps.elte.hu)
--
L a s z l o E. S z a b o
Theoretical Physics Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Eotvos University, Budapest
http://hps.elte.hu/leszabo
MEGHÍVÓ
Az ELTE Angol-Amerikai Intézet Amerikanisztika Tanszékének
meghívására a kognitív nyelvészet egyik megalapítója
RONALD LANGACKER
két előadást tart Budapesten 2004. december 7-én és 8-án. Az előadások
címe:
december 7-én, kedden, 16 órakor:
CONSTRUCTIONS IN COGNITIVE GRAMMAR
december 8-án, szerdán, 16 órakor:
DYNAMICITY, FICTIVITY, AND SCANNING: THE IMAGINATIVE BASIS OF
LOGIC AND LINGUISTIC MEANING
A kb. egy órás előadásokat kb. egy órás vita követi.
Mindkét előadás helyszíne az ELTE BTK kari tanácsterme: 1088
Budapest, Múzeum krt. 4/A, fszt. 39.
A Szegedi Megismeréstudományi Program decemberi programja:
1.
December 6. Lukács Ágnes: Nyelvelsajátítás: szavak és jelentések (2.
alakalom)
10 órától. Irinyi épület, Kardos Terem, Megismeréstudományi Csoport
2.
Decmber 8-9-10 Ragó Anett: A fogalmi reprezentáció kialakulása és
fejlodése - a korai fogalmaktól a szakértoi tudásig
Elso óra December 8. Szerda 16.00 óra, Irinyi épület, Megismeréstudományi
Csoport
Irinyi épület:
Megismerétudományi Csoport, Tisza Lajos körút 103, 3. lépcsoház, Földszint
Minden érdeklodot várunk a kurzusokra!
----------------------------------------------------------
NEMETH Dezso
University of Szeged, Department of Psychology
Email: nemethd(a)edpsy.u-szeged.hu
Web: http://www.staff.u-szeged.hu/~nemethd/
Cognitive Sciences at University of Szeged: http://kognit.edpsy.u-szeged.hu
Minden erdeklodot szeretettel varnak a szervezok!
http://www.renyi.hu/~bioinf/
A Budapest Semesters in Mathematics és a Rényi Intézet meghívja Önt a Computational Neuroscience: Why and How? címmel tartandó szemináriumi elõadásra
Az ülés helye: Rényi Intézet, Nagyterem (Budapest, Reáltanoda u. 13-15. - térkép )
Idõpontja: 2004. december 9. (csütörtök) 16:15
Computational Neuroscience: Why and How?
Péter Érdi - Kalamazoo College and KFKI Res. Inst. for Particle and Nuclear Physics of the Hung. Acad. Sci.
Computational Neuroscience discusses mathematical models, computational algorithms, and simulation methods which contribute to our understanding of neural mechanisms. Several examples will be given about its problems and methods.
1.. Rhythmogenesis in single cells and networks: normal and pathological
2.. Neural networks I: computation with attractors: scope and limits
3.. Neural Networks II: Small-world and scale-free networks
Kicsit későn szerveződött meg ez az egyébként nagyon érdekesnek ígérkező
előadás. Mindenkit szívesen látunk!
Jakab Zoltán
----------------------
Dear All,
(sorry for the short notice) we will have the following lecture tomorrow
at the Budapest Mind Society:
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Prof. John Bickle, University of Cincinnati, Philosophy & Neuroscience
"Who Says You Can't do a Molecular Biology of Consciousness?"
Abstract: "Who Says You Can't do a Molecualr Biology of
Consciousness?" That talk applies my account of reduction to
consciousness studies and talks about some recent work in
molecular neuroscience that is beginning to imping on
reductions of some features of conscious experience.
December 3, Friday, 2004, 3.30 PM, Dept. of Philosophy, CEU, Zrínyi utca
14, 4th floor, room 412.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I hope that despite the late announcement many of you will be able to come.
Best regards,
Andras Simonyi
CHOMSKY & PENROSE ON THE EXPLICABLE AND INEXPLICABLE
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/explicability.html
Stevan Harnad
Chaire de recherche du Canada
Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC)
Université du Québec à Montréal
Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3P8
harnad(a)uqam.ca
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
When Chomsky makes an observation about the limits of the human mind,
he is doing it on a first-person basis, having been there himself --
rather the way Roger Penrose makes a similar argument, but in reverse:
Penrose too has experienced the frontiers of creative mathematical
intuition and insight. He knows what it feels like to make a discovery
that no other mind has made. And he concludes that that is not
something that a computer could do, in part because of Godel's proof,
in part because of the *feeling* that this is something different.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/CM302/Lucas/lucas.ppt
Penrose is of course wrong. A computer certainly can't compute what
Godel proved cannot be computed, but Godel did not prove that what can
be proved cannot be computed, nor that the cognitive processes
underlying what can be proved are not computational -- nor even (and
this is most important) that what it *feels like* to have a
mathematical intuition or insight cannot be computational or even
(this is the most important of all!) that that feeling cannot be
*wrong*!
For the last insight (that mathematical intuition *can* be wrong), we
are indebted to Russell/James for the famous anecdote that the meaning
of life may not be that "the smell of petroleum pervades throughout"
-- even though it may *feel like* that's the meaning of life while one
is under the influence (of the feeling -- induced by nitrous oxide in
the Russell/James example). Feelings can be misleading (even though,
evolutionarily, they better not be misleading more too often!):
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Foundations.Cognitive.Science2…http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad.creativity.html
(Russell invoked this anecdote in the service of pointing out that
mathematicians may be right to trust and follow their intuitions,
particularly when they have proven true before, but that they must not
forget that these intuitions have sometimes led them astray too, and
that, in and of themselves, they are merely hunches, i.e., feelings,
not evidence, and certainly not proof!)
So Penrose is wrong that the brain substrate of mathematical intuition
(and feeling, both veridical and nonveridical) could not in principle
be computational. However, he is probably right that feeling/intuition
is not in fact implemented in the brain computationally (but rather
dynamically, because of the symbol grounding problem, as illustrated
by Searle's Chinese Room thought-experiment) -- though not necessarily
quantum-mechanically, as Penrose suggests (classical dynamics would be
sufficient to ground symbols and rescue the brain's power from Godel
and Searle).
http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.sgproblem.html
But of course saying that feelings are "implemented dynamically"
raises yet another problem: the mind/body problem (or, as I prefer to
formulate it, more perspicuously, the "feeling/function" problem): No
one can explain why or how certain functions are *felt* functions.
There is a *reason* this cannot be explained, however, and that reason
is not the one Chomsky has adduced (and Pinker has repeated, and
McGinn has both repeated and elaborated in the special case of the
mind/body problem): i.e., the reason is not the limits of the human
mind!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/CogSci-Szeged01/0003.htmlhttp://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thesciences.htm
The reason we cannot explain how/why certain functions are felt is
twofold, and has more to do with the nature and limits of (functional)
explanation than the nature and limits of the mind: How/why certain
functions are felt could be easily explained if there could be
telekinesis -- a 6th causal force of nature, the force of feeling/will
-- but there is not. So that leaves only the usual 5 forces. And those
5 dynamical forces (together with the computations they may implement)
are sufficient to explain every functional capacity of the brain,
eventually.
The trouble is, that that leaves no *functional* room for feeling: For
(once that happy, explanatory utopia is reached) whatever our brains
can and do do is fully explained functionally. Feeling itself cannot
be given an independent causal role (on pain of telekinetic dualism),
so it is doomed to remain superfluous in the functional explanation,
hence superfluous, simpliciter. A mere correlate of function, its
causal status unexplained and *unexplainable*, causally/functionally,
for the reasons adduced -- and not because of mysterious limitations
of the mind (which would simply be to swap one mystery for another
mystery)!
Now back to Chomsky's argument: As noted, having been to the frontiers
of the ontic landscape, and discovered vast portions of it that were
undiscoverable to any other human mind, Chomsky has certainly earned
the right to express some 1st-person intuitions on the subject, just
as Penrose is. But he is just as wrong (or almost as wrong, for he
does not actually say what in particular eludes the mind, just that
there may well be such things).
There may indeed be things that are fated to elude the mind forever,
some of them banal (1) -- such as the things we don't have the time or
the luck to ever find out, work out or arrive at mentally, even with
the aid of machines, before human time runs out. Some of the
inexplicables are also more fundamental (2), such as the
Godel-unprovables, NP-completeness, 3-body problems and other formal
obstacles.
The banal inexplicables (1) are because of limitations that are
mental, but banal, hence not mysterious. The fundamental inexplicables
(2) are because of limitations that are formal or methodological,
hence not banal, but also not mental, hence again not mysterious (or,
if mysterious, the mystery is not about the mental but about the
formal). Quantum paradoxes (if they indeed remain unresolvable) may be
among the formal ones, or they may be, like the feeling/function
problem, a result of the (formal?) limitations on causal/functional
explanation itself (but still not mental limitations).
What -- apart from brute, unexplicated analogies with what I do not
happen to know at the present time -- could "truths" that are beyond
the grasp of the mind be, after all? We have that remarkable
generative power that Chomsky has done so much to explain, namely
language, that has so far been perfectly capable of expressing every
truth that we have so far been capable of discovering and formulating
(including all the provable truths of mathematics, which is, after
all, merely a subset of language, part of all that can be said in
words). What would it mean for there to be a truth that our minds are
incapable of discovering, or grasping? Would is be a truth that could
not be expressed as a proposition in a natural language? (Why? and
what sort of a truth would that be? if we can express it as a
natural-language question, should we not also be able to express and
understand its answer in natural language, if the answer exists and we
have the time, luck, or ingenuity to arrive at it?)
If there were such a truth, it would then have to be a limitation of
natural language that it could not be expressed in words (rather like
an ineffable feeling!). But what reason do we have for believing that
anything but what is formally noncomputable cannot be expressed in
words? And if it *can* be expressed in words, what reason do we have
for believing that the human mind would be unable to grasp the meaning
of those words?
But semantics is not really the area in which Chomsky made his
monumental contribution: syntax is. He has discovered the formal
(computational) constraints on that infinite (and previously
mysterious and unexplicated) capacity we have to produce and
understand all and only those utterances that are compliant with
Universal Grammar (UG) -- the constraints on one of our most
fundamental formal capacities.
The discovery and mapping of Chomskian grammar, like the discovery and
mapping of Penrose tiling, is a unique and path-breaking achievement
of the human mind: The discoverer/creators, having been to the
frontiers of the human mind, and seen and felt what it is like, are
certainly more qualified and entitled to report their observations and
feelings about the lay of the land there than any of the rest of us
are. But that does not make their observations anything more than
hypotheses and conjectures, open, negatively, to the clear light of
critical reason (once the smell of nitrous oxide wears off) and
contingent, positively, on future evidence or proof.
Some have been ready to call all declarations of (human)
inexplicability mere failures of (human) imagination, and so they may
(or may not) be! We are well advised to pay more heed to such
declarations (any declarations) when they come from our proven oracles
(those few human minds who have successfully explained, more than
once, the hitherto unexplainable). But oracular declarations should
only be given provisional heed (because of their provenance), just as
Russell's cautionary anecdote suggests. For once the effects of the
nitrous oxide subside, their merits must be judged in the clear light
of reason, rather than the heady rush of discovery.
Stevan Harnad
Chaire de recherche du Canada
Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC)
Université du Québec à Montréal
Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3P8
tel: 1-514-987-3000 2461#
fax: 1-514-987-8952
harnad(a)uqam.ca
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
