Re: ORGASM - Operant Reactionary Graduate Academic Scholastic Mentality

in article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Fred Mailhot at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 11/25/03 11:46 PM:

> Hi Michael...

Salut Fred.

> 
>> Quine's discussion of topics you seem to find engaging is both
>> seminal and fluid.
> 
> heh heh..."seminal"..."fluid"...heh heh...
> 

Just trying to stay on topic.

> 
> On a more serious note, thanks for a long and interesting post with a lot of
> good stuff to digest...

Glad you found it interesting. I decided to scale back my post - this was my
first reading of "Two Dogmas", and it prompted too many ideas to treat at
all adequately, so I stuck mainly to the one idea that hit me the hardest,
the strong similarity of Quine's vivid metaphor to the actual workings of
belief propagation in Bayesian Networks.  Even in that realm I cut it short.
But it suddenly occurs to me that the essay is like an ink blot - a
Rorschach test (what do you mean I'm obsessed with sex, you're the one with
all the dirty pictures, Doc). I see Bayesian Inference; Lester sees an
excellent example of what he terms neo scholastic scriptural exegesis;
Longley sees, well, technicaly it would be all too retinotopic to refer to
the enrichment of Longley's behavioral repertoir in response to altered
contigencies of reinforcement as "seeing"; rather, there is a J. J.
Gibsonesque veridical ecological gestalt of the foundations of Burrhus
Fredericism.

> 
> I've read "Two Dogmas" a couple of times now, and am pretty sure that I
> still haven't gotten it...I turned to Putnam, who has assured me anew that
> what Quine did is of extreme importance, but also claims that there IS a
> analytic/synthetic distinction...(the main point being that this is not such
> a big deal...the really important thing is that there's no "a priori"/"a
> posteriori" distinction...or so the story goes)...
> 

I had a charismatic showman of a professor for my first college physics
class (almost switched my major at the time from geology to geophysics -
keeping things at least a little earthy).  He described the appeal of
physics as the "aha experience", when suddenly you know you "get it". I
cannot resist describing my favorite physics problem: a glass of water sits
on a table, a cube of ice is floating in the water in the glass, inside the
ice-cube there is a brass BB - the ice melts, the BB sinks; does the level
of water in the glass rise, fall, or stay the same?

The thing about the aha experience, the sudden unequivical realization that
you get it, that is bugging me is how to reproduce it algorithmicaly - I
have this code with a vast repertoir of hueristics for segmenting the
digital image of a check, say, into salient structures - seperating the
check from the image of the scanner, text from background ... I can tabulate
statistics about how often which hueristics are effective, I can delineate
contexts in which one heuristic is more effective than another, formulate it
as a conditional probability distribution, but where, in the processing of
one case, one image of a specific check, where is the "aha, I KNOW this is
right"?

But I want to follow another thread - Quine's notion of "Cognitive
Synonomy"; I want to look at that from three points of view: 1) Bag of
words, Word Classes and their meaning, Word Senses and their Disambiguation
- the sorts of problems involved in classifying articles by "topic" (e.g.
for intelligent browsing of the web), or the problems of "Statistical
Language Learning" (Eugene Charniak), 2) Motif identification in biological
sequence analysis (this is a problem of assigning "meaning" to "words" and
"phrases" in the genuinly foreign languages of genomes and proteomes), and
3) The Neural code - the spike trains emmitted by individual neurons -
another question of semantic assignment.  The spike-train thesaurus is
already being built; might be fun to hitch a ride...

Cheers - Michael