tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post5895102723084129146..comments2024-03-23T04:01:39.348-04:00Comments on Understanding Society: Simulating social mechanismsDan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-45873702112335873272013-01-05T21:31:07.981-05:002013-01-05T21:31:07.981-05:00Hi Dr. Little --
Thank you for this and other pos...Hi Dr. Little --<br /><br />Thank you for this and other posts, I have been reading bits and pieces of your multiple blogs since you gave a colloquium talk at George Mason University a few months ago which I attended.<br /><br />I find this "relative explanatory autonomy" idea you raise here and elsewhere very reasonable. But something has been nagging at me about your writing; if I understand you correctly, I think you have not sufficiently clarified that relative explanatory autonomy is a necessity not because of what actually exists in the world but because of the limits of human cognition.<br /><br />In other words, a superintelligent scientific inquirer (who, let's say, might be many orders of magnitude more intelligent than the smartest human), might be able to understand sprawling complex systems containing multiple levels of emergence without resort to simplifying abstractions; they would possess an unfathomable ability to reason about pure complexity. On the other hand, a barely sentient being (say, a highly intelligent chimpanzee) might be best served by simple models of entities and causal mechanisms that seem trivial to us but provide good-enough abstractions with which to engage a complex system. What I am getting at is that I think that it is worth bringing the cognitive science of the human mind (and, for that matter, notions of distributed social intelligence within scientific communities?) into the discussion about what constitutes good explanations. Because ultimately the object is to usefully model the world within one or many actually existing trained human minds is it not?<br /><br />Curious about your thoughts!<br />JoshJoshhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12142086129380161345noreply@blogger.com