[Ham] I have no quarrel with this developmental breakdown as a heuristic model for
educators. However, by defining learning as a biological process, he misses the motivational factors that trigger it. The curiosity which leads to discovery, for example, or the desire to control one's environment by mastering its known principles and reasoning out the unknown. These motives have a valuistic basis, as does everything we learn in the life experience. Intellection is a psycho-organic process, the result of which is the individual's cognizant "being in the world". To equate awareness, intellect, or thinking with neuro-physiology is like equating your computer with the program that runs it. [Krimel] Only a true rationalist could imagine that after skimming a few internet pages they could, through the shear force of their intellect, pierce to the heart of a problem and point to flaws in reasoning that three generations of researches failed to notice. This is a very rich field. One of the main goals of such research has been to explore the relative contributions of heredity and the environment. Piaget thought that infants came into the world armed only with a hand full of reflexes and build the structure of rational thinking through a process of assimilating new experiences into their cognitive structure or by accommodating that structure to fit new experiences. His chief method of research was to give children various problems to solve and then ask them why they responded as they did. Thus much of his work was with children who had already developed language skills. Subsequent researchers have found very clever ways to read the minds of preverbal children and the past 20 years have provided lots of new data to show that even newborns have much greater cognitive abilities than Piaget dreamed of. Actually the invention of the computer prompted a mini-revolution in cognitive studies of all kinds. It provided a new metaphor for how the brain functions and how learning occurs. Let me quickly add that technological advances have been a fertile bed for new metaphors from Descartes' hydraulic model to telephone switching. So yes the people in the field understand that this is _just_ a metaphor. But behaviorists had always urged looking at organisms in terms of input (stimuli) and output (response). The complexity of computers and the richness of their capabilities have provided new ways of understanding how our brains function. Among them is the notion that our brains are hardware and thinking is software. So yes it is a bit like equating "awareness, intellect, or thinking with neuro-physiology is like equating your computer with the program that runs it," except that awareness, intellect and thinking are viewed as software. [Ham] So, I gather that you consider the human mind an energy transducer. Is it your theory, then, that physical energy is transformed to mental energy in the process of thinking? This would imply that reality in its primary or pre-intellectual state is energy of some kind, which I assume must be created. [Krimel] Actually pretty much everything that happens anywhere in the universe involves the transduction of energy from one form to another. This comes from the law of conservation of energy which is one of the laws of thermodynamics. Since "mental energy" is not actually a form of energy, then no I do not think the brain transduces physical energy into mental energy. That is what Descartes thought, though. He believed this transduction actually occurred in the pineal gland which is the only part of the brain that is not replicated on both sides. It sits alone in the center. While this turns out not to be what happens it wasn't a bad guess. [Ham] Not sure what you mean by "hardwired" in this context. We show our feelings by smiling, frowning, laughing, or gesturing, some of which may be autonomic responses, although the autonomic system is usually associated with proprioceptive stimuli, such as sitting on a hot stove. I'm not hardwired to enjoy a woman's beauty or a favorite symphony, nor is my expression of this joy necessarily autonomic. If I were hardwired to respond in a certain way, I wouldn't need value as a stimulus. What I "like" or "dislike" would be meaningless in such an epistemology. [Krimel] As per the information processing metaphor "hardwired" refers to the things built into the structure of the brain. The expression of emotion is hardwired. It is processed in the brain through different pathways than voluntary action. This is what lie detectors capitalize on, for example. They detect things like involuntary changes in skin conductivity that result from the emotional reaction to lying. Similar involuntary responses occur as a result of the full range of emotions. However we learn, or are programmed through experience, to produce these responses to stimuli in the environment. That is the software part. "Hardwiring" then is a product of both what we are born with and what happens to us. It results from the interaction of nature and nurture. [Ham] Could you elaborate on this "impressive range of values" that the newborn Infant possesses or expresses? They certainly can't be aesthetic, moral, conceptual, or intellectual in nature, which would seem to leave only proprioception (e.g., pain, pressure, hunger, tactile-sensibility, etc.) [Krimel] Piaget thought the range of newborn responses was limited to a set of reflexes. These included the moro reflex, the rooting reflex, the Babkin reflex, the Babinski reflex, the stepping reflex and perhaps a few more. You can Google this for yourself. More recent research has shown that newborns "prefer" voices to other sounds and that they prefer high pitched "motherese" voices to other voices. They prefer the smell of their mothers to other smells. They prefer sweet tastes to sour or salty tastes. They prefer faces to other shapes. They can imitate facial expressions and some gestures from as early as 45 mins. after birth. As a side note "proprioception" seems to be a word that you are either miss using or co-opting as a word in Hamish. In the real world proprioceptors are the nerves that tell us what the position of our body parts are in relation to one another. For example this is what police officers are looking for in field sobriety tests. I can tell you from personal experience that when they go on the fritz life becomes a bitch. [Ham] Apparently, there is no such thing as an "acquired taste" or individual preference in your worldview, and we're all programmed to react to our environment non-valuistically. How in this automatic world can Quality or Value have any meaning? [Krimel] As I mentioned folks in the cognitive sciences have applied computer metaphors to learning and cognition but they are keenly aware of the many limitations of the metaphor. Among them is the fact that unlike a computer, learning and experience involves a restructuring of the brain. As we learn, neural pathways become more efficient. That is, the chemical interactions in the synapses work better. In children events in the environment effect the formation of these neural pathways. Actually, up until about age six these nerve pathways and the interconnection of neurons is still growing. Throughout this period many more pathways and connections form than will survive into adulthood. The overproduction of connection allows for enormous flexibility in what and how we learn. There is a "use it or lose it" process that occurs in children on into adulthood where the pathways that are used strengthen while the ones that are not used die off. The shape and structure of these pathways in all of us are the result of the specific experience in each of our lives. The "final" product then is the result of the interaction of what our genes determine we are born with and what the environment determines we will do with it. [Ham] (I'll defer the demands stemming from your "vigorous disagreement" with my ontology until I have a clearer understanding of your epistemology.) [Krimel] I will not be responding to your post on this as I have addressed the issues you raised there several time in the past. As you might recall in the past I made many attempts to read your online term paper but failed each time when I could not get past the serious logical flaws in your arguments early on. Reading through the house of cards you built on such shifting sands was just more than I could endure. However, as you may recall, I forced myself to read all of it as an Easter meditation. I found the whole thing so depressing I had to enlist Case to respond to it. Again I did not get the impression that you even understood the criticisms that Case provided. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
