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Article 1441 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Animal Intelligence vs Human Intelligence
Message-ID: <1991Nov20.173143.6419@spss.com>
Date: 20 Nov 91 17:31:43 GMT
References: <38039@shamash.cdc.com> <1991Nov19.000813.26477@spss.com> <38079@shamash.cdc.com>
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In article <38079@shamash.cdc.com> map@svl.cdc.com writes:
>But I didn't say that an infant's learning "... does not involve
>consciousness," [....]   

No, but you said it "happens without conscious intervention," which sounds
about the same in my book.

>Of *course* infants learn via exploration and experimentation, but this
>is not what I'm talking about.  What you are talking about is an
>infant who has already reached the perceptual level, i.e., who's
>brain has already "learned" to recognize entities [....]

What I'm saying is precisely that this matter of perception depends on
that exploration.  The child's recognition of its mother or its Bart Simpson
doll would not occur, or would occur later or deficiently, if it were not
for its tactile/motor/social exploration.  Similarly, it's hard to
see how the child can use its depth perception to estimate distances till
it has acquired active experience with distance by moving around, or how
it can be said to recognize objects at all before it has created the purely
conceptual notion of object permanence.

There was a nice experiment along these lines: one infant monkey was allowed
to explore a space freely, while another was attached to it by a kind of
pantograph and could only watch.  The second monkey's functioning was
definitely impaired (unfortunately I forget the details on how).

The case of the inverting glasses seems quite different from that of the
infant.  With the glasses the brain must simply learn to recognize a distortion
of what it has perceived for years; no exploration is required, just a little
practice.  The infant must learn perception in the first place, must learn
that there is a world, that its senses are telling it something about it,
and what exactly that is-- a much bigger task, and one that requires both
active exploration and heavy thinking. 


