----- Original Message -----
From: "Cliff Stabbert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Ben Goertzel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2003 9:52 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] Spatial vs. Kinesthetic Thought (was: the Place system of
the rodent hippocampus)
> Monday, February 24, 2003, 6:08:43 PM, Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
>
> BG> Hmmm...
>
> BG> So, I'm thinking: The human brain is wired to do a lot of abstract
cognition
> BG> in terms of metaphorical maps of the environment, and these are tied
in with
> BG> macro-world classical physics....
>
> I think the spatial/visual metaphor is strongly present -- as
> indicated in the language we use, such as "in the first place", "in
> the second place", "where do we go from here", "x leads to [is a path
> towards] y", etc.
>
> But for me there's always been a sense that logical thinking is
> strongly connected as well to kinesthesia: the sense of movement, with
> one logical "constraint" limiting the way something can move much in
> the way the joints of limbs are limited, so that fixing your upper arm
> in a certain position limits the arcs your lower arm can swing through.
> Lots of logic puzzles are based on motion and its blockage, e.g.
> sliding tile puzzles, Sokoban, Klotski.
>
> <ramble>
> Now that I think of it, most two- and multiplayer board games are
> based on maps or terrains -- visual two-dimensional areas; whereas
> individual puzzles link more closely to the kinesthetic or freedom of
> movement senses -- such as the above, and Rubik's cube, and Tetris.
> I guess this makes a certain sort of sense -- our competition is
> rooted in mammal territoriality, while our toolbuilding is built on
> the opposable thumb...hmmm. It's hard to cooperate on logic problems,
> programming problems, "thought" problems, and in some ways attempting
> to build the tools and language to do so, to transcend that barrier,
> has been a large part of recent human progress.
> </ramble>
>
> In both cases, of course, it's still true that an abstract domain is
> being mapped onto a model we're more familiar with from our senses.
>
> Perhaps we would be more intuitively familiar with waves and their
> interactions if we were, say, bats; and then we might have a better
> feeling for quantum mechanics ("there's a 10-foot-or-so wall 15 feet-
> or-so in front of me" with exact details unknown). There's a little
> bit of wave-sense from sound, so that we can map redshift to audio
> dopplering, but we don't seem to translate much to that domain -- it's
> so much more nebulous than clear, stark pictures and solid, immoveable
> objects.
>
Cliff,
I very much appreciate your comments about waves. And like you, I think
that our 'cogno-motor' intuitions would be very different if we had evolved
with different sensory apparati. It's my opinion that much of human
'cogno-motor' intuition is linear in orientation partly due to our sensory
apparati and partly due to our flexible cognitive apparati. Along these
lines of thinking, we are the result of the evolutionary equilibrium in our
sensor-actuator system and our cognitive system to transform and/or
translate to linear domains even though the ultimate goal achieved might be
non-linear overall.
In physics, there is a distinction between 'classical' wave considerations,
e.g. sound, and 'quantum mechanical' wave considerations, e.g. a subatomic
particle. This distinction is generally only important on the microscopic
scale and is closely related to the Heisenberg bracket, or his so-called
uncertainty principle, that originally motivated the formulation of quantum
mechanics.
> --
> Cliff
>
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