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Description of  Oswald Wiener's Theory of Thought: Talks on Poetics, Formalisms, and Introspection

Artistic research in Wieners uvre As a versatile and creative thinker, Oswald Wiener (19352021) developed from an artist into a researcher out of sheer necessity. At the end of his life he emphasized: I do not aim at a synthesis of introspection and automata theory but rather at contrasting them. Which relationships identified in introspection can in a fairly satisfactory way be understood as realizations of relationships within a formal system, e.g., the formal system of automata theory. Or the other way around: How well does automata theory as a model (i.e., the computer as mental metaphor, 'Physical Symbol Systems,' today's Artificial Intelligence ...) capture essential features of human thought? What does 'in a fairly satisfactory way' mean in this context? What, and how strongly, does the formal system abstract from natural processes? Read more