h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about
confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary it's not enough to choose a "subject" (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one."
-Roland Barthes ("Jeunes Chercheurs")

Jeeze!... Thats sounds complicated!

Sid

It does sound complicated, doesn't it. That's because it's too complicated. As an interdisciplinary scientist myself, I am very familiar with what goes into it. So here goes:
Interdisciplinary science occurs whenever someone who is interested in more than one subject spots that 2 or more of the subjects that he is interested in have different and incompatable explanations for the same phenomena. This individual must then take steps to see that this incompatability is investigated. That all there is to doing interdisciplanary science.
There was even a science created in the 60's aimed at using this pioneering (then) idea to form the other half of current science. This science was called nexialism, and works from the assumption that there aren't many different sciences, there is just science. So you start from the beginning with simple questions that any kid will be able to answer, and gradually take the highly fragmented and cliquey stuff that is named science and integrate it into a synthetic whole. As part of the job of doing this, you actively search out when the new stuff you are adding is incompatable woth the stuff you have already added, and instead of doing what most "respectable" scientists do and saying that the stuff they are not familiar with is wrong, you add the second form, and flag both facts/rules as incompatable, and then apply ordinary scientific method to the incompatability to test which parts of both are compatable, and which are most similar to reality. Simple really, but back then they had neither the computer power, or the computer science to do the work properly. Perhaps we should try and revive it?

Maybe in the sciences this is true, but I disagree completely. The things I try to integrate: primarily anthropology, art history, museology; secondarily linguistics/philology, philosophy, film studies, comparative literatures, classics. You can adopt the methodology from one place and the subject matter from another, but you can't really say that seemingly incompatible approaches are "right" or "wrong." For example, although it can be dangerous, semantics and rhetoric can be taken from linguistics, literature, and classics, and translated into terms of looking at art or film studies--but that doesn't mean that other methods of art history are suddenly obsolete. I see most of my disciplines as tools for looking at the visual--which study is, in part, a means to an end of museum work for me. Thank you for your interesting, provocative comment, though. If you'd like to react to this, feel free.

I am intrigued by the nexialism idea, though, but I'm not sure that a computer could pull it off in the humanities, or you have a lot of people out of a job.

You are an interdisciplinary scientist? As in . . .

Kathy

Okay, took a look at the website. Cool stuff! I especially was intrigued by the part about the mages/archetypes and the human mind, a user's guide.

What do you think about the divide between the sciences and the humanities? Do people make too much of it? Does it actually exist?

Kathy

I am an interdisciplinary scientist, as in Iam trying to produce a device seen on star trek called "the universal translator". This involves various ideas comming from machine translation, fuzzy logic, computer programming, library science, linguistics, sci-fi, relational databases, expert systems (and AI in general), stuff from intelligence amplification studies, etc.

As regards "is there a real devide between the humanities and the sciences", I don't really think so. The split isn't there, it is between stuff that we understand very well (ie chemistry) and stuff that we only have a vague idea about (ie intelligence, sociology, psychology). If you look at nobel prize winners, you will find that almost universally they all have a wide range of interests from science right through to creative stuff like painting, music, etc.

As regards to not knowing if the computers are up to it, when you include the beowulf clusters running linux, they are up to it, but the question is, are the programmers? also if the combination of the computer and the user aren't up to it, there is no way that the user by himself has any chance at all.

Neat . . . I love translation and linguistics and AI although I don't know as much as I would like. Have you read Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language? It's a really good book, and worth the length. You are right about the user-machine combination: that's why the Turing Test & Chinese Room refutation are so problematic (see my contributions to the conversations at those entries).

Kathy

The chinese room problem is largely irrelevant. The person inside is only playing at being a computer, and acting algorithmically, and as the people who use it fundamentalisticaly won't accept the possibility of the machine being intelligent, by their own arguament, neither can the human be intelligent. This ignores the main question of can the room behave intelligently, which depends only on the data it is fed, and the rules it has been given, so assuming that the humans feeding it data and rules are intelligent, and the data and rules have been well tested, the room will be exhibiting intelligence.
As regards the turing test, computers have already passed it for social ai (which is what it test for), so you only have to work on technical ai, ie expert systems, etc.

i know . . . that's exactly what i'm against. searle wants us to map the "Consciousness" part onto the person, not onto the whole system.

Kathy

on hofstader, have you read "geodel, echer, bach - an eternal gold braid: a metaphorical feuge on minds and machines....". if not, then I thoroughly recommend it. it is the definitive work in its subject matter.
Regarding "i don't know enough about ...", tell me what you want to know, and if I know anything about it, I will tell you.

I love, love, love, love, love that book!!!!!!!! C

Me too, and unfortunately, I seem to share it's sense of humour (which can be very inconvenient when it crops up inapropriately).
If you like the sense of humour there, you might like piers anthony's xanth novels, or robert asprin's myth novels and phule novels.

I love Xanth too!!!!! Of course, fits right in with H2G2 and Monty Python, etc.

Kathy

As a result of these posts, and others, There is a new web page on my website. It is called "nexial.htm" and you will have to visit my user space to find the address of the site.
(blasted moderators)

oops, now there are sections for various constants and effects in science that have croped up since. also science, interdisciplinary science, the modeling cycle, and even more stuff has been added in the last couple of weeks.

ps, the institute of nexialism is sponsoring people in america doing inter-disciplinary qualifications, so you might want to pop along to them and ask what they will help you do. you can find their site from my nexialism page.