If your mental architecture is a hierarchy of modules that are predictive controllers at various tasks and levels of abstraction, they can be "shorted" at any given level to form simulators for those phenomena. One can thus practice or explore skills in the higher-level modules (and let one's ideas die in one's stead.)
I thought I had invented this scheme until I found that it appeared in Marvin Minsky's PhD thesis the year I was born :-) See the Emotion Machine p. 159. This happens in all kinds of mixtures -- pretending is a key element of childhood learning. I'll bet a lot of it goes on in dreaming as well. Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
