Bob: I'm not totally convinced that having a high number of degrees of freedom is actually necessary for the development of intelligence. Of greater importance is the sensory capability, and the ways in which that data is processed. A birds beak is a far less elaborate tool than a human hand or arm, but there are examples of birds making and using tools to extract food. These capabilities require insight - the ability to imaginatively create a possible solution to a problem, then act out that plan
It's a v.g point re the beak. But... the bird has an incredibly flexible neck which crucially enabled it, for example, to fashion a straight wire into a hook. And I suspect that the imaginative, cognitive flexibility to see the straight wire as hook is intimately dependent on the physical, movement flexibility of the body. That's the connection, also, that the Euro crowd are insisting on - enactive cognition.
Of course, what follows from this - it suddenly occurs to me in a half-garbled way - is that an either/or mindset here is radically wrong. Actually, if you think evolutionarily, organisms start as extremely free protoplasm. But as they develop it is by evolving rigid parts - skeletons and beaks - that they gain still greater, *controlled* flexibility.of movement, as opposed presumably to floppy, uncontrolled flexibility. Any thoughts here?
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