Stephen:Mike, have you given any thought to how deaf and blind humans become mentally competent?
Certainly. By using their touch, smell, kinaesthetic and the other sensorimotor sensations of their own body to get to know the world. Blind people can draw - they can draw outlines of objects, which they have obviously learned through touch. Check out the movie, Ray, and the extensive physical reasoning that goes into a blind person's recreation of their world, (i.e. Ray Charles).Check out the movie, The Miracle Worker, and how long it took - and how hard it was for - Helen Keller to acquire language, although she had long ago acquired competence in physically engaging with the world around her.. First, for everyone who wants to be intelligent about the world comes the thing. The object The things of the world. You first have to get to know the things of the world physically, using, literally, common sense. A mutually exchanging set of senses. Only then much later comes words/names - pointing at things. There is no substitute for knowing the real thing. You seem to be saying that there is - an agent can be intelligent by just knowing the *names* of the things without ever having seen the things themselves, without ever having seen any thing, apart from more names. All you need to know about an apple is a set of letters A-P-P-L-E, and other letters like F-R-U-I-T and R-E-D. (You also seem to be implying that blind/deaf people get to know the world by language *without* senses!) You're the subject of a very, very powerful illusion - like the writers of the Bible and possibly billions of literate people and certainly many children - that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Well, obviously it wasn't. In the beginning was a lot of just sensory knowledge and some kind of intuitive, general concepts about the world. Then, after animals developed the capacity to sensorily reflect about the world, presumably came the grunt or cry, which helped them recall images of things in their absence. Then vastly later, came the word/pictogram - n.b. visual pictures, still connected to the things of the world. Then only a few thousand years ago came the phonetic alphabet and words as symbols entirely abstracted from the things they refer to.Words like every other medium/sign system are hypnotic. We become wrapped up in them and think they're everything - when they only reason they "make sense" is that we have already acquired imaginative, sensory experience of the things they refer to. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
