From: Liane Gabora (liane@berkeley.edu)
Date: Mon 24 May 2004 - 07:46:39 GMT
Natural selection is but one form of evolution, construed as it was before
Darwin in its broadest sense as the change of state of an entity through
ongoing interaction with an external world or context. The mathematics of
selection theory requires multiple, distinct, simultaneously-actualized
states. In cognition, however, each thought or cognitive state changes the
selection pressure against which the next is evaluated; they are not
simultaneously selected amongst. Creative thought is more a matter of
honing in on a vague idea through redescribing successive iterations of it
from different real or imagined perspectives; in other words, of
manifesting some portion or aspect of what the mind is capable of
manifesting, through its interaction with a particular situation or
context. It has been proven that the mathematical description of
intrinsically contextual situations--that is, wherein our lack of knowledge
lies not with respect to the state of the entity itself but with respect to
how it interacts with a context---introduces a non-Kolmogorovian
probability distribution, and a classical formalism such as selection
theory cannot be used. I wont go into the details of the formalism we have
been using (its in our papers) but that is the gist of the rationale for
NOT using selection theory.
Liane
At 22:24 10/05/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>Scott's response:
>
>Liane, what do you mean by a non-Darwinian evolutionary process?
Liane
Gabora liane@berkeley.edu
<http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane>http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane
Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies, VUB, Brussels Ph:
(32)2.644.26.77
Psychology Department, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-1650 Ph: 510-642-1080
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