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Monday, February 03, 2003 Here is a very interesting passage from Kim Stanley Robinson's BLUE MARS. Pages 55-56, I believe. Also, Erica has Blogged it on up! Visit her exciting new website at http://jellibabi.blogspot.com Kind of a co-incidence really that I learn that Erica has a new blog, when I post a blog about psychology and the mind.... hmmmmm "Sax shook his head. Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for twenty-first . . . and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure build-up, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like - what? - an ecology - a fellfield - or else a jungle populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well - a bit grandiose, that - really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better - weather - storm fronts of thought, high pressure zones, low pressure cells, hurricanes - the jetstreams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds . . . life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood. 'What are you thinking?' Michel asked. 'Sometimes I worry,' Sax admitted, 'about the theoretical basis of these diagnosis of yours.' 'Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very precise, very accurate.' 'Both precise and accurate?' 'Well, what, they're the same, no?' 'No. In estimates of a value, accuracy means how far away you are from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A hundred plus or minus fifty isn't very precise. But if your estimate is a hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite accurate, while still not being very precise. Often true values aren't really determinable, of course.' Michel had a curious expression on his face. 'You're a very accurate person, Sax.' 'It's just statistics,' Sax said defensively. 'Every once in a while language allows you to say things precisely.' 'And accurately.' 'Sometimes.'"posted by AJ | 4:56 PM | | ||
