Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Complexity in Cognitive Science: The Debate Rages On

Having just renewed my membership in the Cognitive Science Society, I received this year's back issues of their journals, and was delighted to see that the Topics issue in January contained a lively discussion on the value of complexity theory (chaos, fractals, 1/f noise, etc.). The anti-complexity (or rather, anti-buzzword) side was championed by Chris Eliasmith, who (as a licensed electrical engineer with a Ph.D. in philosophy) has been doing some extraordinary work on the hardest problems in the field.