A talk on understanding 27 Jun 2019 I will be presenting this one at ISHPSSSB in Oslo in a couple of weeks. Comments and objections received with the usual ill grace… [embeddoc url=”https://evolvingthoughts.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Comprehension.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”] Epistemology Philosophy Theories
Biology Social dominance psychology in humans 2 Jul 200922 Jun 2018 There is a syllogism I call the Phylogenetic Inference: All members of clade X are F Species S is a member of clade X S is F It’s not infallible, but it is a good inductive rule, because monophyly acts as a kind of Straight Rule for biological induction. Let’s… Read More
Creationism and Intelligent Design Leiter on Nagel on Meyer 11 Dec 2009 Brian Leiter gets it 100% right on Thomas Nagel’s ignorant review of the book by Stephen Meyer, of the intelligent design marketing agency, the Discovery [sic] Institute. Go read… Read More
Epistemology What should evolutionary psychology comprise? 25 Jul 201125 Jul 2011 Recently there have been a number of posts and comments on evolutionary psychology. A new paper in PLoS Biology argues that human brain evolution since the “stone age” (really?) has been rapid and multifaceted. And there are renewed calls for evolutionary psychology to change. As usual, John Hawks has a… Read More
Schmidhuber (LSTM etc) https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360; Friston etc Where this might have a difficulty is when one discusses mathematical understanding. This comes up with computer generated proofs, and in mathematical education. It is objective, but a property of a learner (one can explain a proof, one can generate a new theorem, one can apply a particular method to a new area or recognise a dual). This obviously overlaps a lot of modern physics, and partly addresses de Regt’s problem about simplified “false” models that are actually deeper mathematically, though it does ring with his description of understanding as a skill. But no equivalent to causality, ISTM, especially if one is a constructivist in these matters. In the example of population genetics, I think it is the “higher” level where selection etc is happening – the molecular genetics is too “low”. It is the coarsening of the description that allows one to see what is really going on (sim thermodynamics, QM) in a complex system.
I don’t know Hempel, no idea who he is or the context. I don’t think i want to know any more about him. It conjures the image of a man sitting on a spike or a Dalek.