Trent: Oh you just hit my other annoyance.
"How does that work?"
"Mirror neurons"
IT TELLS US NOTHING.
Trent,
How do they work? By observing the shape of humans and animals , ("what
shape they're in"), our brain and body automatically *shape our bodies to
mirror their shape*, (put themselves "into their skin", i.e. body/ "into
their place"/ "into their shoes"), and we can work out the nature/ style of
their movement and with it their emotions.
Hence by observing:
http://www.hotsalsa.co.uk/danceMat.jpg]
(little more than literally shapes of the dancers - with almost zero
muscular info)
you can not only get up and mimic the immediate shapes/movements of the
dancers *but create further movements - a whole dance* in the style of those
dancers, which will be reasonably faithful.
(Note that we can not only understand the immediate shape/movement and
position of their bodies in space, but their preceding movements and
subsequent movements - "every [still] picture tells a [moving] story" to the
human brain - a remarkable and v. complicated extension of our powers of
mirroring).
Similarly by hearing a few words spoken by a person, you can pick up the
shape of their voice and style of their diction - and shape your own voice
and diction accordingly - and mimic it, and create further lines in their
style. For example, just one sentence of 60-odd words:
"If you want to hear about it, you'll probably want to know where I was
born, and what a lousy childhood I had, and how my parents were occupied
before they had me, and all the David Copperfield crap, but if you want to
know the truth, I don't really want to get into it."
can give you a whole voice/character.
Both are *whole-bodied* operations - bringing your whole body to bear on the
process of understanding - and fundamental to your ability to understand
other humans and animals - applied even to inanimate objects ("the book lay
on the table"/"the wardrobe stood in the sitting room") - and fundamental to
intelligence, and our ability to intelligently copy, and learn from others'
skills, and acquire culture generally.
Both operations also depend on *fluid transformations* - our ability to
mimic others depends on *fluidly transforming* our own body or voice shape
to match theirs - a necessarily rough, imprecise, *non-formulaic* operation,
since the two bodies will always be significantly different in shape, and
there will be no formulaic/mathematical way for our brain to morph one into
the other.
Fluid, non-formulaic transformations are also fundamental to our capacity
for analogy and metaphor and crossing domains - and that thing called
general intelligence - our capacity to see a storm in the swirls of milk in
a teacup, or tears in drops of rain, or a solar system in an atom.
We understand and think with our whole bodies.
(Oh, Ben, these are all original or recently original observations about the
powers of the human brain and body which are beyond the powers of any
digital computer. You claimed never to have heard an original observation
here re digital computers' limitations - that's because you don't listen,
and aren't interested in the non-digital and non-rational. Obviously a pet
in a virtual world can have no real body or embodied integrity).
-------------------------------------------
agi
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/
Modify Your Subscription:
https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
