From owner-cse575-fa07-list@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU Sat Sep 22 11:12:45 2007 Received: from ares.cse.buffalo.edu (ares.cse.buffalo.edu [128.205.32.79]) by castor.cse.Buffalo.EDU (8.13.6/8.12.10) with ESMTP id l8MFCiGu028105 for ; Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:12:45 -0400 (EDT) Received: from front3.acsu.buffalo.edu (warmfront.acsu.buffalo.edu [128.205.6.88]) by ares.cse.buffalo.edu (8.13.8/8.13.6) with SMTP id l8MFCacb089360 for ; Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:12:36 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 2308 invoked from network); 22 Sep 2007 15:12:36 -0000 Received: from mailscan6.acsu.buffalo.edu (128.205.7.95) by front3.acsu.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 22 Sep 2007 15:12:36 -0000 Received: (qmail 2253 invoked from network); 22 Sep 2007 15:12:36 -0000 Received: from deliverance.acsu.buffalo.edu (128.205.7.57) by front3.acsu.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 22 Sep 2007 15:12:36 -0000 Received: (qmail 2023 invoked from network); 22 Sep 2007 15:12:34 -0000 Received: from listserv.buffalo.edu (128.205.7.35) by deliverance.acsu.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 22 Sep 2007 15:12:34 -0000 Received: by LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 14.5) with spool id 2556561 for CSE575-FA07-LIST@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU; Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:12:34 -0400 Delivered-To: cse575-fa07-list@listserv.buffalo.edu Received: (qmail 21271 invoked from network); 22 Sep 2007 15:12:34 -0000 Received: from mailscan8.acsu.buffalo.edu (128.205.7.55) by listserv.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 22 Sep 2007 15:12:34 -0000 Received: (qmail 2620 invoked from network); 22 Sep 2007 15:12:34 -0000 Received: from castor.cse.buffalo.edu (128.205.32.14) by smtp3.acsu.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 22 Sep 2007 15:12:34 -0000 Received: from castor.cse.Buffalo.EDU (rapaport@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by castor.cse.Buffalo.EDU (8.13.6/8.12.10) with ESMTP id l8MFCYke028096 for ; Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:12:34 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from rapaport@localhost) by castor.cse.Buffalo.EDU (8.13.6/8.12.9/Submit) id l8MFCXlb028095 for cse575-fa07-list@listserv.buffalo.edu; Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:12:33 -0400 (EDT) X-UB-Relay: (castor.cse.buffalo.edu) X-PM-EL-Spam-Prob: : 7% Message-ID: <200709221512.l8MFCXlb028095@castor.cse.Buffalo.EDU> Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:12:33 -0400 Reply-To: "William J. Rapaport" Sender: Introduction to Cognitive Science From: "William J. Rapaport" Subject: What Marc Hauser believes but cannot prove To: CSE575-FA07-LIST@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU Precedence: list List-Help: , List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Owner: List-Archive: X-UB-Relay: (castor.cse.buffalo.edu) X-PM-EL-Spam-Prob: : 7% X-DCC-Buffalo.EDU-Metrics: castor.cse.Buffalo.EDU 1336; Body=0 Fuz1=0 Fuz2=0 X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.5 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00 autolearn=ham version=3.1.8 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.8 (2007-02-13) on ares.cse.buffalo.edu X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV 0.90.2/4358/Sat Sep 22 07:33:58 2007 on ares.cse.buffalo.edu X-Virus-Status: Clean Status: R Content-Length: 1677 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: What Marc Hauser believes but cannot prove ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The following very short essay, here reprinted in its entirety from: Brockman, John (ed.), What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the age of Certainty (New York: HarperCollins): 167-168. is a very nice statement by a leading cognitive scientist on what computational cognitive science is all about. ======================================================================== What makes humans uniquely smart? Here's my best guess: We alone evolved a simple computational trick with far-reaching implications for every aspect of our life, from language and mathematics to art, music, and morality. The trick: the ability to take as input any set of discrete entities and recombine them into an infinite variety of meaningful expressions. Thus we take meaningless phonemes and combine them into words, words into phrases, and phrases into Shakespeare. We take meaningless strokes of paint and combine them into shapes, shapes into flowers, and flowers into Monet's water lilies. And we take meaningless actions and combine them into action sequences, sequences into events, and events into homicide and heroic rescues. I'll go one step further: I bet that when we discover (intelligent) life on other planets, we'll find that although the materials may be different for running the computation, they will create open-ended systems of expression by means of the same trick, thereby giving birth to the process of universal computation.