[lit-ideas] Re: Madness, Foucault, Nietzsche & Emerson

  • From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 13:58:27 +0900

Eric, glad you enjoyed the anecdote. I would be wary though of assigning
too much weight to "brute force computing." There is no denying that things
once impossible have become possible because of the sheer amount of
computing power now available. Research on emergent properties is, however,
far from confined to the mechanical approaches "brute force" suggests. With
a tip of the hat to Complexity Digest, I suggest a look at M.E.H. Newman's
recent summary <http://arXiv.org/pdf/1112.1440v1>.

John

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >> The same line has been in use for eighteen years and, according
> to advertising critic Amano Yukichi captures perfectly that moment
> of sudden realization when a Japanese remembers something that
> should have been obvious but was somehow forgotten.
>
>
> As a former copywriter, I relish this tale. The Aha! Moment, when
> the charge in the spark gap leaps, when the water comes to a boil,
> can probably not be replicated by brute force computing. (Kasparov
> noted something similar in the way humans play chess: computers
> brute force their way through all possible moves, but humans start,
> in a tenth of a second, with moves pared down to three or four and
> then look for novelty.) The computer will probably always be subject
> to Searle's Chinese Room effect, that it cannot know the
> significance of that which it knows only in imitation.
>
> My favorite copywriter scene in film is from the Hudsucker Proxy,
> the naming of the hula-hoop. Three copywriters shown only as
> shadows. A drumbeat of free associations come from two standing men,
> and finally one man slumped over a typewriter raises his head and
> says "Guys, guys, guys, .... ." Pure emergence from a complex
> adaptive system earning whatever copywriters earned in the 1950s.
>
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-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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