[From: Bruce Nevin (Mon 930111 12:10:56)]
[ Rick Marken (930111.0900)]
Bruce Nevin (Mon 930111 11:11:11) --
The following outline of ideas from a fellow BBNer, Al Boulanger,
seems to me like a fruitful direction to look for certain aspects
of higher level control and reorganization as involved in
learning at those levels.Having read it I must ask "why"?
What goes on when you have an "aha!" experience? Boulanger talks
of "housing" a problem in alternative coordinate systems. Viewed
from one perspective, a problem is impenetrable; from another,
obvious.
In my personal experience, I draw an analogy between the
perceptions that are problematic and other, remembered
perceptions that are well known to me. These are often physical,
spatial metaphors for perceptions that are not necessarily
spatial or even physical (in the same sense). An "aha!" may
result in (or with, or from) a shift to a different metaphor.
The well-known perceptions (the "model" to which the analogy is
made) are very much in the background, as indeed are the
processes of analogizing; what is in the foreground are the
perceptions that are problematic. Reframing may be a shift to a
different basis for analogy. I suspect that each of us resorts
to remembered and imagined physical analogs to orient our
thinking and organize our perceptions when on unfamiliar ground
or in the face of unexpected perceptions in the midst of what we
had thought familiar. I suspect that these are relatively few
for each of us, and perhaps to a degree idiosyncratic,
differences of a "family" sort accounting perhaps for some of
what was traditionally called temperament. It seems plausible
that a mathematical treatment of their geometry would organize
them into families (not necessarily the same) in a useful and
revealing way related to Boulanger's preliminary and sketchy
ideas about coordinate systems.
There's presumably more, but this I think is the drift of the
intuition that told me this was relevant.
Bruce
bn@bbn.com