Copyright 2009 David Dodds
That leaves us with simulations for the time being. We can effect models
and theories by creating simulations of them. One way humans think is to
create models*; mental, in a computer or physical, which are used to
represent things and events in the world. Long ago we used a pebble to
represent a sheep or goat in our flock. We called these pebbles
counters. We had a leather container for these pebbles. Joe Smith had
this many goats in his flock, where this was dumping out all the pebbles
in his leather bag. A pebble could be called uh. So Joe had uh pebbles
times the cycle of demonstrating the existence of each pebble. It became
clear that the innovation of giving a unique word to represent each
counting group: one, two, three, four, etc; was quite useful and
replaced the time and effort of having to go through the display of
individual counter-pebbles activity. (*models are metaphors).

It is easy to see that counting pebbles evolved into the abacus, but the
jump to the sliderule is more opaque.

To shorten that story; the numbering system developed from one to one
correspondence with physical objects. That is why there was no (concept
of) zero long ago. What kind of pebble is a non-existant pebble, a zero
pebble? Some smart folks came up with the idea of cypher (cipher) which
means empty.

Perhaps it was the realization that focussing on the content of a
container (to be used for holding counting-pebbles) instead of on the
pebble itself, allowed for the concept of empty or zero. The
concept of none (ie zero) is apparently not trivial.

Some number of things discussed above are based on the human brains
ability to do metaphorical processing. This will be discussed as an
important tool to developing machines which are more capable than
current computers. Part of what holds back current computers is the
quality (ie richness) of the componentry which constitutes them, just as
the (lack of) richness in ANNs prevents such a network that has the same
neuron count as an ant or fly from having anywhere near the same
capabilities of an ant or fly.

We will see that introspection plays a role in metaphor capability. The
kind of metaphor we are going to be looking at are things like: black
hole, event horizon, gravity well, aircraft, motorcycles. (Not
Shakespeare or rhyming cuplets). We will also see how introspection and
other metaprogramming techniques can be used to implement a
non-subjective form of awareness. Situation Awareness systems will be
looked at. [continued next posting]


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