Noah, All, evolution gives humans and other living things many pre-canned functions like edge detectors in the eye. In vision system some people add the early edge detectors and some ask the blank slate to figure everything out for itself from scratch. My preference is to give the system as much of a leg up as possible. Later when we have functioning system we can explore the growth from blank slate question.
Self and not-self is a very early learning. I am that which I can control the movement of. The other is the warm, soft, and giving entity (Mom and Dad). The other becomes the family. Then strangers are discerned and apparently rated as dangerous instinctively, then learned as safe and not-safe strangers. If we want to be experimental psychologists we can force the system to learn these early lesson from scratch. If we want a functioning embodied conversationalist in a reasonable amount of time then let's give it a head start. Both are valid pursuits. We have to pick one to start with. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "opencog" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to opencog+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to opencog@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/opencog. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/7eacea5d-a872-4941-a4de-ba0af793e96e%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.