Comments on: Turing Award Winner Peter Naur Disses…Everyone?

By: Keith Power

Keith Power — Fri, 04 May 2007 00:22:14 +0000

Just read Naur’s “A Synapse-State Theory of Mental Life” (http://www.naur.com/synapse-state.pdf).

In this he does very little but disparage Hebbs and paraphrase James. His addition seems to be a suggestion that there might be 5 different parts to the thought apparatur.

At the end he states the work was submitted to Nature and Neuron, but rejected without being refereed. Of course it wasn’t, there’s nothing novel of worth in it, and I can even tell that.

By: Keith Power

Keith Power — Thu, 03 May 2007 23:09:29 +0000

I also found his description of how “thought goes on” similar to my experience of consciousness, in a way I’ve never felt about, say, a neural network.

Since then I’ve been reading James’ Psychology: The Briefer Course. The longer Principles of Psychology is available online at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/index.htm

He has a remarkably clear style. Just thinking about thinking I find difficult, but he not only isolates the different activities during though, but manages to communicate it too.

By: Diomidis Spinellis

Diomidis Spinellis — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:47:25 +0000

I read the article in CACM a couple of days ago. The types of conscious thinking that we experience based on the model he describes (short term memory, train of thought) made sense to me. On the other hand, I was disturbed by his use of “nodes” as a central element of his model. I had not encountered nodes before in the context of neurophysiology, and he did not bother to define them or present physical evidence of their existence.

By: vanessa

vanessa — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:40:21 +0000

Thank you for the thoughtful comment, Lasse. I, too, would have found Naur’s ideas more intriguing if he had presented them with a little less attitude. It’s also interesting to know that he has previously demonstrated a tendency towards dogmatism. Cheers.

By: Lasse Hillerøe Petersen

Lasse Hillerøe Petersen — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:15:23 +0000

Interesting. I just read the article in CACM myself, and had the same thoughts. Either he is a misunderstood genius, of he suffers from some sort of megalomania. Funny thing is, that things are just not as clear-cut as he seems to perceive them to be. For example, the semiotics of C.S. Peirce (influenced by W. James IIRC), have a strong following among some of the people Naur criticizes. Much of his “Synapse-State” stuff reminds me of Marvin Minsky’s _Society of Mind_, which is an old, but interesting book. But certainly this implies that Naur’s ideas are neither as innovative nor as “heretic” as he would like to think.

I think Naur has always been a man of sharp opinions. I seem to recall talking to CS students at DIKU, who mentioned the way he almost attempted mind-control in the way he imposed his normative vocabulary (”datalogy” for CS, “datamat” for computer, etc.) I have also been reading what he thought of the development of Algol 68, and he certainly wasn’t holding anything back in his attacks on van Wijngarden, to the point that I am suspecting he was trying to hide his failure to understand van Wijngarden’s two-level grammar.

One thing I think is particularly bad is the way he disses psychology and philosophy, without having any significant academic base in those fields himself. He has some good points, but a little less “attitude” would bring them across much better. And sometimes it is painfully obvious that the psychology he criticizes belongs to a tradition that has been out of fashion for a long time. (Behaviourism, for example.)

-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen