Monday, February 24, 2003, 6:08:43 PM, Ben Goertzel wrote:
BG> Hmmm...
BG> So, I'm thinking: The human brain is wired to do a lot of abstract cognition
BG> in terms of metaphorical maps of the environment, and these are tied in with
BG> macro-world classical physics....
I think the spatial/visual metaphor is strongly present -- as
indicated in the language we use, such as "in the first place", "in
the second place", "where do we go from here", "x leads to [is a path
towards] y", etc.
But for me there's always been a sense that logical thinking is
strongly connected as well to kinesthesia: the sense of movement, with
one logical "constraint" limiting the way something can move much in
the way the joints of limbs are limited, so that fixing your upper arm
in a certain position limits the arcs your lower arm can swing through.
Lots of logic puzzles are based on motion and its blockage, e.g.
sliding tile puzzles, Sokoban, Klotski.
<ramble>
Now that I think of it, most two- and multiplayer board games are
based on maps or terrains -- visual two-dimensional areas; whereas
individual puzzles link more closely to the kinesthetic or freedom of
movement senses -- such as the above, and Rubik's cube, and Tetris.
I guess this makes a certain sort of sense -- our competition is
rooted in mammal territoriality, while our toolbuilding is built on
the opposable thumb...hmmm. It's hard to cooperate on logic problems,
programming problems, "thought" problems, and in some ways attempting
to build the tools and language to do so, to transcend that barrier,
has been a large part of recent human progress.
</ramble>
In both cases, of course, it's still true that an abstract domain is
being mapped onto a model we're more familiar with from our senses.
Perhaps we would be more intuitively familiar with waves and their
interactions if we were, say, bats; and then we might have a better
feeling for quantum mechanics ("there's a 10-foot-or-so wall 15 feet-
or-so in front of me" with exact details unknown). There's a little
bit of wave-sense from sound, so that we can map redshift to audio
dopplering, but we don't seem to translate much to that domain -- it's
so much more nebulous than clear, stark pictures and solid, immoveable
objects.
--
Cliff
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