Xref: manuel sci.cognitive:338 comp.ai.philosophy:7142
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Keywords: chaos, neurobiology
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Organization: TRW Systems Division, Fairfax VA
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I suppose we all use personal experience as an input to our research. I'm
going to describe something here that has influenced my ideas.
I've learned over the years to read minds. This is _not_ ESP, but rather a
four-stage process as follows:
1. Instantiate a personality model,
2. Calibrate it based on observation,
3. Do a process switch into the calibrated model,
4. Observe the model.
The personality model appears to have some relationship to a full
personality--it's often good enough to predict behavior in the short term.
Observation includes defocused inputs. The process switch requires
suppression of the sense of myself, and often requires a displacement of
the point of view to the location of the other individual. Observation is
difficult, since it involves deliberately "being" within the personality
model, rather than in one's own comfortable personality. I find this whole
process exhausting.
The results are often startling, and it is the simple existence of this
sort of ability that leads me to speculate on distributed cognition in
social groups.
A couple of insights have emerged from this:
1. Lou Pecota and Tom Stafford have shown that chaotic processes are very
cheap to control. Freeman's work seems to indicate that a chaotic
process is an efficient point to start from if you're doing pattern
matching. Perhaps human personalities are based on chaotic processes
(as Paul Raup's work seems to indicate) for efficiency of control.
2. The ease with which we innovate based on existing ideas may well
reflect a chaotic process responding to small control signals. Since
this "stream of consciousness" appears to be generated by a process
akin to the process by which speech is generated, we may find that
the evolutionary origin of this innovative process to be associated
with the evolutionary origin of speech.
Cheers,
···
From: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com (Harry Erwin)
Subject: Mind Reading
Date: 2 Sep 92 12:47:59 GMT
--
Harry Erwin
Internet: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com