How an animal or robot with 3-D manipulation skills experiences the worldSloman, Aaron and Chappell, Jackie and CoSy Project Team, (2006) How an animal or robot with 3-D manipulation skills experiences the world. In: 10th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 23-26 Jun 2006, Oxford. Full text available as:
Alternative URL: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/papers/index.php#pr0602 AbstractAbstract I was ill and did not manage to present my poster. This is a PDF slide presentation of the main points. This presentation elaborates on Wittgenstein's remark: `The substratum of this experience is the mastery of a technique' (Wittgenstein) I try to show, with illustrative videos that many 'techniques' are implicitly involved in ordinary experiences -- and that the complexities grow as a child develops, extending its ontology and therefore the variety of affordances it can experience and use. I point out that there are two interpretations of sensorimotor contingencies, one somatic (relating only the contents of sensory and motor signals at various levels of abstraction) the other exosomatic (amodal, objective), referring to an environment that exists independently of whether and how it is experienced or acted on, and that the latter provides computational advantages in some cases, supporting a Kantian rather than a Humean view of knowledge and concepts. This also suggests a re-interpretation of mirror neurons as 'abstraction neurons'. Comments/DiscussionWhat we are conscious of in the environment depends on the ontology we have available. A child whose ontology does not include the notion of boundary, or the notion of alignment of boundaries may not be able to replace a cut-out wooden picture in its recess, even if he knows which recess it should go in. Careful observation of children at various stages shows transitions that involve extensions of the available ontology, which must go along with development of suitable forms of representation and mechanisms for manipulating them, and an architecture that combines them all. Thus the substratum of the more sophisticated child's experience is mastery of many 'techniques', not just one as implied by Wittgenstein (who probably did not intend that). It is suggested that there are considerable differences between precocial species whose competences and architecture are mostly genetically determined and altricial species that develop most of their own competences e.g. through playful exploration, driven by meta-level bootstrapping mechanisms.
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