From ag33@cse.Buffalo.EDU Tue Apr 3 11:53:13 2007 Received: from hadar.cse.Buffalo.EDU (root@hadar.cse.Buffalo.EDU [128.205.32.1]) by castor.cse.Buffalo.EDU (8.13.6/8.12.10) with ESMTP id l33FrDNp023956 for ; Tue, 3 Apr 2007 11:53:13 -0400 (EDT) Received: from hadar.cse.Buffalo.EDU (ag33@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hadar.cse.Buffalo.EDU (8.13.6/8.12.10) with ESMTP id l33FrDms028340 for ; Tue, 3 Apr 2007 11:53:13 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from ag33@localhost) by hadar.cse.Buffalo.EDU (8.13.6/8.12.9/Submit) id l33FrDNE028339; Tue, 3 Apr 2007 11:53:13 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 11:53:13 -0400 (EDT) From: Albert Goldfain To: "William J. Rapaport" Subject: burchfield on symbols and "the real thing" Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-DCC-Buffalo.EDU-Metrics: castor.cse.Buffalo.EDU 1336; Body=0 Fuz1=0 Fuz2=0 Status: R Content-Length: 921 dr. rapaport, my friend was recently involved in a photo contest at the burchfield-penny art center and I went with her to pick up her photos...I saw the following quote prominently displayed in the building: "An artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols, which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him." (from http://www.burchfield-penney.org/ceb/) I know almost nothing of burchfield as an artist, but this seems to capture the artist striving against the Kantian problem of phenomenon-noumenon. Just change the word "artist" to "programmer" and "paint" to "program" :-) Sometimes our programs end up seeming more *real* to us than the things they are models of. This may be because it is easier to understand the behavior of the process of a program modelling a hurricane than to understand the real thing. albert