Pete:

I have (mis?)spent a great deal of my life studying Cognitive Science, Epistemology, Logic and Cognitive Psychology. The paper you point to by Boyd has my 'Crank Detector' going off the scale. Just a few comments:

1) His analysis of the import of Goedel is very incorrect. Even his sumation of what Goedels work means is very incorrect. It was painfully incorrect.

2) His blurb-bit pointing to thermodynamics ignores 60 years of information theory, C. Shannons work, and is of very questionable relevance to epistemology- at least on the level he wants to make it

3) His blurb-bit on Heisenburg is also of the same character: its difficult to believably relate the mechanics of sub-atomic quantum elements to macro-level emergent properties of the CNS and its interaction with 'reality'. Your car and your dog is composed entirely of quantum bits on one level of observation, but I promise you that you can measure the relative velocity and position of both macro objects at the same time. Especially when dog and car intersect at the same place and time.

4) Most of what he is talking about is just a poorly re-phrased version of Frame and Schemata cognitive theory, but with almost no reference to Piaget, no reference to Piagets progeny, and no reference to Minsky whatsoever.

Overall, this stuff is badly regurgitated confusion. Its just intelligent enough to wow laymen into beieving something profound is being said, and just dishonest or ignorant enough to ignore, repeat (rip-off?) or rehash whole libraries of research.

Most educated folks know a bit about Goedel, but not exectly and precisely what the import of Goedels work really is. Most educated folks know about thermodynamics, but don't know that a 60 year electronic-engineering-and-academic-tradition has mined its relevance to inofrmation and tried many times (wiuth limited success) to connect it to theories of cognition. Most folks know about Quantum theory, but don't grok that statements about quantum particles are ontologically different than statements about very very very tiny billiard balls ('particle' becomes a misleading metaphor for what is best thought of in terms of mathematical statements, as at that scale a thing is fundamentally different than what our intuitions about stuff tell us'). Most people may know who Minsky and Piaget are, but won't catch on when you dress up their theoris differently and trot them out as something new.

Anyway, I would follow up this stuff if I were you... You may be being led down someones hall of intellectual mirrors.