Excellent examples! For controlled experiments, though, I'd prefer to avoid
testing subjects most people already think of as having an inside context
("inner world", experience-as, "what it's like to be a", etc. for anyone who
might be triggered by the word "context" >8^). So, I wouldn't want to
experiment on humans. Animals would be better. (My mom still doesn't believe
animals have souls.) Bacteria would be good. Viruses might even be the best,
given our current context.
Surely the "zero intelligence" literature has some suggestions for good
experimental subjects. People often talk of the social insects as if they don't
have minds. But maybe that's too far the other way?
My inclination would be to use something for which we have a somewhat decent
computational analog. C. elegans <http://openworm.org/> might be a pretty good
choice. There's a paper by Shalizi or Crutchfield, maybe, that talks about
tradeoffs between space and time in computation that I'm pretty sure was posted
on this list at some point. That type of evaluation criteria applied to both
the computational model of C. elegans and the actual worm would, I think, come
close to testing this "holographic" principle expressed by EricC. I'll try to
find that tradeoff paper.
On 5/6/20 6:06 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> An observation that might lead to a testable hypothesis of embodied mind:
>
> High school students spent the morning, in a classroom, learning comparative
> fractions, taking tests that proved they could solve this kind of problem. In
> the afternoon the went across the street to the supermarket and asked to
> decide which was the better buy: 12 ounces at $2 or 18 ounces at $4.
> Individuals who score 100% in the classroom, were able to solve the problem
> in the grocery story less than 50% of the time.
>
> Tailors in Morocco spend their days laying out patterns on bolts of cloth and
> are sufficiently skilled at this tiling problem their wastage is less than
> 2%. Removed from the bazaar, installed in a classroom, and given scaled paper
> cutouts and paper bolt of cloth, they could not do better than 15% wastage.
>
> I remember reading about similar situations involving car mechanics and
> reading comprehension (ebook versus paper).
>
> The material is in the anthropology literature - Jean Lave comes to mind as
> possible author, Ettiene Wegner - but not at all sure I am remembering
> correctly.
>
> The authors suggested that "knowledge" was somehow stored in "context" with
> context quite literally being the physical environment in which the person
> was learning.
>
> How to design a controlled experiment???
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