[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

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
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, May 6, 2020 7:07 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
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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