Abstract

PSYCHOLOGICAL INQUIRY 2018, VOL. 29, NO. 4, 194–195 https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2018.1537274 COMMENTARIES Circe’s Victims: Are We Too Easily Seduced by the Siren Song of Mathematical Physics? Mark Daley Department of Computer Science and Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Toronto, Canada Contemporary psychology—driven in part by modern of examples in which a single instruction is sufficient to neuroscience and following the path set out by the other implement universal computation (Nur € nberg, Wiil, and natural sciences over the last centuries—is rapidly embark- Hicks, 2003). Closer to the topic at hand, the famous “Rule ing upon a collective program of formalization. It is a nat- 110” (Cook, 2004) shows the computational universality of ural scientific instinct to borrow formal intellectual very simple cellular automata—a class of systems that general- frameworks, and tools, from disciplines in which they have ize dynamics of the sort observed in the Ising model. And so we arrive at the crux of our query: Dalege, already become established, foundational, dogma. Physics, in particular, presents the ambitious scientist with an extremely Borsboom, van Harreveld, and van der Maas (this issue) mature, and demonstrably effective, box of tools