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- Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 12:30:32 EST
- Sender: "Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet)" <CSG-L@UIUCVMD.BITNET>
- From: "Bruce E. Nevin" <bnevin@CCB.BBN.COM>
- Subject: reframing
- Lines: 46
-
- [From: Bruce Nevin (Mon 930111 12:10:56)]
-
- [ Rick Marken (930111.0900)]
-
- >Bruce Nevin (Mon 930111 11:11:11) --
- >
- >>The following outline of ideas from a fellow BBNer, Al Boulanger,
- >>seems to me like a fruitful direction to look for certain aspects
- >>of higher level control and reorganization as involved in
- >>learning at those levels.
- >
- >Having read it I must ask "why"?
-
- What goes on when you have an "aha!" experience? Boulanger talks
- of "housing" a problem in alternative coordinate systems. Viewed
- from one perspective, a problem is impenetrable; from another,
- obvious.
-
- In my personal experience, I draw an analogy between the
- perceptions that are problematic and other, remembered
- perceptions that are well known to me. These are often physical,
- spatial metaphors for perceptions that are not necessarily
- spatial or even physical (in the same sense). An "aha!" may
- result in (or with, or from) a shift to a different metaphor.
- The well-known perceptions (the "model" to which the analogy is
- made) are very much in the background, as indeed are the
- processes of analogizing; what is in the foreground are the
- perceptions that are problematic. Reframing may be a shift to a
- different basis for analogy. I suspect that each of us resorts
- to remembered and imagined physical analogs to orient our
- thinking and organize our perceptions when on unfamiliar ground
- or in the face of unexpected perceptions in the midst of what we
- had thought familiar. I suspect that these are relatively few
- for each of us, and perhaps to a degree idiosyncratic,
- differences of a "family" sort accounting perhaps for some of
- what was traditionally called temperament. It seems plausible
- that a mathematical treatment of their geometry would organize
- them into families (not necessarily the same) in a useful and
- revealing way related to Boulanger's preliminary and sketchy
- ideas about coordinate systems.
-
- There's presumably more, but this I think is the drift of the
- intuition that told me this was relevant.
-
- Bruce
- bn@bbn.com
-