Ooops...thought you said, "excursion"...

Actually, pretty interesting although a shade abstruse (not trying to be obtuse).

I would enjoy seeing Noam Chomsky being found in error and taken down a couple of notches for entirely different reasons... namely his mideast 'philosophy' and anti-Israel stand.

Yes GW, the bais of the scientific method is to continually reevaluate any 'truth,' anytime new evidence is discovered.  The problem with 'some' scientists is that that have changed their current 'understanding' of <whatever> into a dogma - a belief.  They believe that have discovered the truth, and refuse to re-evaluate their <whatever> when new data is discovered.  In a sence, they have 'made' their own religion.

I'm alright with this statement. Most people with that opinion state the first part and leave off the second. I think that placing faith in a process is different in a lot of important ways from placing faith in a specific set of facts. So, while I personally think that you're right in a way, they are different in a couple of important ways, too.

No need to apologize for threadjacking.

Definitely. For one, I'm fairly certain that religious sects far outnumber factions in the scientific community, and that's likely because science requires verification by repeatable testing while religious testimony can be based entirely on interior experience. I guess in that sense, I do agree that a mind that thinks with recursion contains infinite conceptual possibilities. But there are only so many grains of sand on the Earth at a given time.

That little article you linked also makes me wonder how much, if any, progress the 'intelligence' measuring crowd have made recently. I'd love to have a culture-neutral form of IQ test to apply to those folks without recursion in their heads. Does that fundamentally simpler language framework slow them down at problem-solving? A social dyanmics study would be interesting to read also--does that inability to nest phrases have effects on how they settle disputes?

I think that is a misuse of the term 'faith'.  Scientists place 'faith' in the scientific method, which is a logistical construct used to provide a framework for exploration of hypotheses.

It's akin to saying you have 'faith' that 1 + 1 = 2.  Well it's defined that way (and don't bother with what it is in binary), 'faith' is a nonsequitur.

I would entirely agree that there are scientists form whom certain theories have achieved a religious aura to which 'faith' can be applied (the AGW argument to speak of one, and let's not debate that here, there's already a thread which hopefully is dead).  However, what they do isn't really 'science' anymore, it's far more akin to politics.  Science, though, is not faith based, even if some scientists may treat their work (or the work of others) as though it were.

But to the point of this thread.  I'm not sure I understand what 'recursion' means here.  I'm certainly no linguist, so perhaps someone could elaborate on it for me.

Thanks

Discussions of the necessity of linguistic recursion are fairly amusing, especially those originating from Chomsky. The average neuron has the ability to form recursive connections in its inherent structure, yet this capability does not necessarily imply that a particular set of neurons needs to create recursive connections. It has long been thought that this linguistic structure is necessary during the creation of sentience since the referencing of self by self appears necessary for self-awareness. Yet, there are several examples in English which cast doubt on this. Let's look for example at the following statement: "This Statement is false." This is a paradoxical statement in general. If the statement was false, it would be true, and if it was true, it would false. However, our minds are not so easily tricked into this paradox, as we can read the sentence and understand it to be meaningless. It would appear as though our minds have a built in safeguards for infinite recursion, which is not exactly a surprise. As any programmer will tell you, infinite recursion is to be avoided at all costs. Thus, it is not suprising that life too would attempt to avoid such pitfalls.

Well, we are all doing the best we can to understand the world we live in.  None of us is born with the knowledge of the way the world works, and why some things are and some things aren't.  You might describe science as faith, and maybe it is, but what else do you we have to do all day and night?  Just say "there is lots to discover, and I'll never discover it all, so I'll just sit around doing nothing."  What is "life" hasn't even been defined.  Why are some compositions of substances inherently "alive" and some aren't?  And what is the difference between a body that has some "life" in it, and a body where inherent life has passed away?

We have to have "faith" in something, and I prefer to have "faith" in the scientific principle, and more generally, adjustment and improvement over the journey of life and lives.  Because after all, what more is there than what apparently "is"?  And what does it all mean?

Best regards,
Steven.

Very true. And most importantly, as I'm sure you know, is that it works. And when we're led up a false path through faulty premises, eventually the bottom falls out and the data are re-interpreted as necessary.

True, but I wouldn't call them safeguards per se. The "software" that runs on the human machine is really fundamentally different than that that runs on computers. It's an analogy that's tossed around alot, but I'd argue that it's really a confusion of (or, more likely, a failure to make explicit) the different levels of analysis.

I'm sorry, but how do you expect me to take anything you say seriously after this statement? Especially when you're point against would have been my point for? Everything that has come out of any field of engineering? Thank a scientist for discovering the fundamental principles. It's not perfect, and I don't think anyone would suggest it is, but to say that it just doesn't work is silly.

And please, spare me the lecture on how neurons work. What you've described is a fairly simple and 'not entirely correct' analogy. The proper logic gate analogy is at the synapse, not the neuron. Each neuron may have 100s of synapses when you consider their dendritic trees as well as their terminals that work together in ways that we just don't understand yet. Together, the neurons work in ensembles that seem to use statistical averages of their inputs to perform their functions by virtue of the way they are wired together. In that sense, it's hard to separate hardware from software as easily as you can with a computer.

Ok, unfortunately, I think that I may have let my personal dislike for you derail the discussion. Don't mind me.

Fair enough. I would suggest that a good working definition of 'works' in this context to be: "Produces things that are widely used and would not be available without it." That said, I didn't mean for this thread to be a debate on the merits of the scientific method. But I won't be upset or offended if anyone else wants to continue along those lines.

*shrug* I just thought it was a "fun" and fairly obscure finding with potentially interesting implications.

I am unsure if I would agree with your definition of works, as this would exclude a large set of systems which can be said to "work". Though ultimately my statement was poorly worded. The scientific method much like many systems of inquiry is more of a thought experiment than a practical tool. While many researchers and thinkers have applied the methodology successfully to create great advances, it become questionable if the method itself is to be commended for these advances or if the raw imaginative power of the human mind would have made the discoveries outside of such rigor.

The lack of recursion means that a language is semantically finite as long as it is conceptually finite. Let's look at language L with some grammar G. Now, we shall define a non-recursive grammer in the following way, Grammer G contains rules R. We shall denote A->B to mean that A contains a reference to rule B. For G to be non-recursive, two things must be true. First, that for all A and B in R, there is no such A and B such that A->B and B->A. Secondly, there is no such sets {X1,X2,X3,...Xn} and {Y1,Y2,...,Ym} in R such that A->X1->X2->X3->...->Xn->B and B->Y1->Y2->...->Ym->A. The first rule being a special case of the second wherein our two sets are both {empty}. Under this non-recursive grammar, our language L will always terminate unless G contains a rule set R which is both infinite and contains an infinitely long set of references. A language without semantic recursion would mean that concepts could not be circularly referenced. Thus like our syntactic recursion, one could only have a finite set of meaningful reference. In a larger sense, I doubt any structural limits would cause a significant 'cognitive disadvantage'.

I am not exactly sure how one would analogize 1+1=2 and the scientific method, as one is a fact of definition while the other is a methodology of inquery based upon the socratic method.