Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!yeshua.marcam.com!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!demon!chatham.demon.co.uk!ohgs
Subject: Re: What is Common Sense?
References: <37ibrb$auh@everest.pinn.net>
Organization: Royal Institute of International Affairs
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Date: Tue, 18 Oct 1994 07:00:47 +0000
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People may be interested in a recent and relevant book. Implicit Learning and 
Tacit Knowledge (An essay on the cognitive unconscious) is by AS Reber (OUP 
1993). The author is an experimental psychologist who has been trying to 
understand and measure the underlying processes fo cognition of which human 
subjects are unaware. Three decades ago, he showed, for example, that people 
who were presented with "sentences" made up of symbols in ways which reflected 
an underlying grammar (of which they were ignorant) were far more likely to be 
able to pick "meaningful" sentences written in the same grammar when exposed to 
them that chance would suggest. In other words, the unconsciuous mind detected 
and built upon semantic regularities in the absence of any sense (or 
sensibility) whatsoever.

Reber differentiates two approaches to mental processing: the "consciousness" 
and the "implicit" stances. The former takes the view that consciousness and 
self-awareness is the foundation on which processing an understanding of the 
environment is based. The latter - his own view - is that the unconscious (or 
pre-conscious) brain performs most of the sorting, compression (in the terms of 
an excellent entry by Clayton Gillespie elsewhere in the wood) which ubnderlies 
our subjective sense of awareness. It is here that we shoudl turn our 
attention, he implies, in order to understand how the living environment of an 
organism (or machine) is to be represented and, by implication, that if we do 
not understand these processes in some detail, then "consciousness hunting" is 
a waste of time. We know that basic learning does not imply awareness 
(semantics and boring flame - or anyway, smoulder - wars apart) and we know 
that there are many degrees of complexity at which different kinds of learning 
and compression of what is to be learned occur. Reber points to the robustness 
of these structures, to their independence from "cognitive" issues such as the 
state of mind of the percipient. AI folk have much to learn from the clockwork 
of NI.
 
_________________________________________________

  Oliver Sparrow
  ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
