Dave, 

Is this embodied mind?  Or Stygmergy? Or are they the same?  I just don't know. 
Josh? 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[email protected]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, May 6, 2020 7:07 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

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???

davew


On Tue, May 5, 2020, at 4:04 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Thanks. I've read the Chemero one. And I've read something by Hutto, 
> but I don't think it was that. Regardless, my (maybe testable) 
> hypothesis is what I'm interested in:
> 
> If a black box demonstrates behavior that can't be captured by any
> (known) algorithm, then that would be an indication that something
> (unmodelable) was happening inside the black box. And that unmodelable 
> thing might be called "thinking".
> 
> We can extend that, I think, to "surprising behavior", which I think 
> gets at what we usually mean by "thinking". If a black box 
> demonstrates a long memory with not-quite-but-almost predictable 
> behavior, then we might accuse it of thinking.
> 
> Both would be counter-examples to Dave's assertion.
> 
> On 5/5/20 2:55 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> > So, there are a few varieties of that right now, that are trying to 
> > get along well together. Emobidied Cognition, Enactivism, Ecological 
> > Psychlogy, Extended Cognition, etc. As a starting point for that work, 
> > especially for the more mathematically inclined, I recommend "Radical 
> > Embodied Cognitive Science" by Tony Chemero 
> > <http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-reading-group-chemero-2009-radical.html>,
> >  for the more philosophically inclined, I recommend "Radicalizing 
> > Enactivism" by Dan Hutto 
> > <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/radicalizing-enactivism>, and for the more 
> > general thinker interested in an overview of cool ideas I recommend "Beyond 
> > the Brain" by Louise Barrett 
> > <http://fixingpsychology.blogspot.com/2012/01/beyond-brain-review-out.html>.
> 
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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