I gave my talk "Logic and computation as biophysics" yesterday. Here is a picture of me making the presentation. I have an imperfect recording of the presentation that will be made available through IASE. If you are interested in access to the recording request that access through me.
I am saddened today by the death of Joe Ransdell.
Over the past decade Joe has been a constant source of knowledge, wisdom and guidance. He was an outstanding Peirce scholar and helped me greatly as my work developed early on. He was sympathetic toward my humble efforts, defended my work in the face of criticism and at one point came out openly as a supporter of the work, encouraging others to review it.
He was a friend to many of us in the Peirce community. He was the moderator of Peirce-L. He will be sorely missed as a member of the general community of Peirce Scholars and by me personally.
I had planned to spend the day at a Language and Cognition workshop at Stanford in a celebration of linguistic and connectionist intellectual investments.
Aside from the global admission yesterday that "nothing we do works" and "this obviously is not how the brain works" I slept though the first presentation excepting to pick up an apparently impotent reference to Peirce. I was equally bored in the second, though the presenter was at least loud enough to keep me awake.
Then to top it Pat Suppes presented more EEG results, these suggesting that phonemes are related to phase in electrical signals from the brain. He stuffed the presentation with lots of (obvious but arbitrary) physics equations, the sole virtue of which was to befuddle the audience and keep me awake.
The advertised promise in the workshop is the discovery that Bayesian methods apply. I'm sorry to tell them that probability theory is only going to help reasoning about what they do not know. The brain does not perform the statistical calculations they suggest.
I'm sitting there thinking "Good god, we have to stop this nonsense" ... Very disappointing.
