AI and cognitive psychology rant (getting more and more OT - tell me if I should shut up)

[Stephen Horne]

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 12:04:58 +0200, anton at vredegoor.doge.nl (Anton
Vredegoor) wrote:

>Stephen Horne <$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$@$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>>Now consider the "Baldwin Effect", described in Steven Pinkers "How
>>the mind works"...
>
><SNIP>
>
>>A human brain is not so simple, but what this says to me is (1) that
>>anything that allows a person to learn important stuff (without
>>damaging flexibility) earlier in life should become innate, at least
>>to a degree, and (2) that learning should work together with
>>innateness - there is no hard divide (some aspects of neurological
>>development suggest this too). So I would expect some fairly fixed
>>heuristics (or partial heuristics) to be hard wired, and I figure
>>autism and Asperger syndrome are fairly big clues as to what is
>>innate. Stuff related to nonverbal communication such as body
>>language, for instance, and a tendency to play activities that teach
>>social stuff in childhood.
>
>Sometimes I wonder whether Neandertals (a now extinct human
>subspecies) would be more relying on innate knowledge than modern Homo
>Sapiens. Maybe individual Neandertals were slightly more intelligent
>than modern Sapiens but since they were not so well organized (they
>rather made their own fire than using one common fire for the whole
>clan) evolutionary pressure gradually favored modern Sapiens.

As I understand it, Neanderthals had a very stable lifestyle and level
of technology for quite a long time while us cro-magnons were still
evolving somewhere around the North East African coast. In accordance
with the Baldwin effect, I would therefore expect much more of there
behaviour to be innate.

While innate abilities are efficient and available early in life, they
are also relatively inflexible. When modern humans arrived in Europe,
the climate was also changing. Neaderthals had a lifestyle suited for
woodlands, but the trees were rapidly disappearing. Modern humans
preferred open space, but more importantly hadn't had a long period
with a constant lifestyle and were therefore more flexible.

Asperger syndrome inflexibility is a different thing. If you were
constantly overloaded (from lack of intuition about what is going on,
thus having to figure out everything consciously), I expect you would
probably cling too much to what you know as well.


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk