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From: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Summary: Reductionism -or- The Forest and the Trees
Keywords: Synthetic Reasoning
Message-ID: <43472@linus.UUCP>
Date: 8 Jan 89 14:22:10 GMT
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Reply-To: bwk@mbunix (Barry Kort)
Organization: IdeaSync, Inc., Chronos, VT
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I continue to marvel at Dave Peru's fertile contributions to
our discussions in this newsgroup.  The Minksy/Conway/Capra
excerpts were most stimulating.

Reductionist (analytical) reasoning is easy to describe and
easy to teach.  But reductionism has a shortcoming.

If I give you a large, assembled jigsaw puzzle, and you examine
it piece by piece, you will end up with a pile of carefully
examined pieces.  But you will have missed seeing the big
picture hidden in the assembled puzzle.  This is called the
Forest and the Trees syndrome.  After examining every element,
you must painstakingly reassemble them to see the big picture.
When you do so, you experience a profound psychological
transformation, called Insight or Epiphany.  This rare and
treasured mental event is accompanied by a biochemical rush
of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which yield a sense
of euphoria ("Eureka!  I have found it!")

Another place reductionism fails is in the understanding of
emergent properties of circular systems.  The simplest of
circular systems is the Furnace-and-Thermostat system.
When the furnace and thermostat are connected in a feedback
loop, the system exhibits the emergent property of maintaining
a stable room temperature in the face of unpredictable changes
in the outside weather.  Feedback control theorists and
cyberneticians appreciate the emergent properties of circular
systems, but their appreciation is akin to seeing the big
picture in the pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces.

Minsky and Conway, and Gauss and Poincare engage in 
synthetic reasoning (the complement of analytic reasoning).
Instead of understanding something by taking it apart,
they understand something by putting it together.  It is
harder to teach synthetic reasoning.  Artists and sculptors,
playwrights and poets, theoreticians and children -- these
are the synthetic thinkers, the practitioners of creative
intelligence.

The feedback loops of these discussion groups give rise to
an emergent property:  the synthesis of ideas from diverse
quarters.  The melting pot of ideas and the melding of minds
is the synthetic product of circular information channels.

--Barry Kort