Anomalous Presumptions

Unfortunately I think the idea of brains / minds “computing” (as typically discussed) is an example of type thinking. Certainly people do something that is functionally equivalent to what we normally call computing in many situations. More generally, people (and animals, and even plants and bacteria) process information in the Shannon sense (i.e. not discrete symbols but negative entropy). But the mechanisms are based on interactions within populations (of cells, especially nerve cells) and can’t be understood beyond a certain point without taking that into account.

I’ve been reading an interesting (and relatively accessible) book on cellular information processing called The Touchstone of Life, by Loewenstein. It is entirely about how information is managed (at the molecular level) in cells, and it certainly could be seen as describing computation. However it demonstrates a completely different way of thinking about information processing than our typical algebraic / logical models, so it is a good corrective for those of us (and I certainly include myself) who’ve had way too much practice with algebraic style computation.

Filed by Jed at 3:39 pm under Population thinking
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I had to prepare a talk recently on “Science as Social Practice” and was struck by a quote from Ernst Mayr (via Three Toed Sloth):

The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically opposed to those of the typologist. …. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real.

Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (Basic Books, 2002), p. 84, quoting a 1959 paper of his own.

Discussions of this issue note that “type thinking” attributes variation to error (or in Chomsky’s case to “performance”), while “population thinking” sees variation as contributing to competence. Of course Chomsky does talk about populations at the level of speakers, and notes that different speakers typically have learned different syntaxes. But he doesn’t believe that population mechanisms could underpin syntactic competence in an individual.

I think that a lot of philosophical and linguistic thinking is attempting to work with ideal types when what we’ve actually got is populations at multiple levels, and they can’t be adequately understood by “type” thinking. I’m sympathetic to this tendency because I think type ideas are much more natural for humans. Unfortunately they break down in important cases, just like geocentric astronomy or Newtonian space/time. This comes out most clearly when systems are changing (e.g. children learning language or scientists inventing new language).

Filed by Jed at 3:26 pm under Population thinking
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