Learning

The question of learning is a fascinating one. Why do we learn, how do we learn, and what do we learn? One can probably try and answer these questions by considering the current thinking on cognition. Perception is fundamental to this tack. With perception goes the thinking around memory stores: long term memory and short term memory. All of this seems a bit mechanistic to me to be honest.

Yes, surely situation awareness is key to learning, for many events are just filtered out. Interaction with the environment may be seen as core to the process of learning and indeed, it forms the basis of nearly all theories of learning and intelligence. But is that it? My dog is rather aware in this sense, and in terms of homology it has an organ similar to my brain in the physical space. Does this mean that my dog is just especially impaired when it comes to learning? Where did humans leave dogs behind in evolution of the learning ability of the brain and can we be sure that this is in fact the case? Is knowledge just the product of learning or can we claim the concept of a priori genetic knowledge? Darwin punts the need for evolutionary learning (a priory learning) as a prerequisite for survival. Does this mean that real learning can only happen in the context of survivability, that is, the acquisition of true knowledge, knowledge that transcends the individual is dependent on threat scenarios?

Some authors, notably Karl Popper, point to language as a key concept in self-awareness and the concepts of knowledge (Popper is careful to not call this knowledge the equivalent of the German “Wissen” – the Greek equivalent of the knowledge of the gods). If this conjecture is accurate (it approaches Truth), then there is definitely a difference between me and my dog. However, my dog has signalling abilities; I used signals recently in France to explain that I was feeling like death warmed up to a French doctor. I signalled my pain when I breathed, coughed and looked dizzy! He considered my situation knowingly and did exactly the tests that my Afrikaans speaking doctor would do had I consulted him. And he came to the same conclusion and prescribed similar antibiotics. Surely, this was only signalling. In context to be sure, but my dog can do that as well. I am just not sure that my dog will be able to put together the story of its own misery in a past, present and future coherent sense.

Being conscious of identity, having a theory (not just a sense) of time and being able to construct discourse on expectation seems to be other aspects of learning that are important when I read musings of the enlightened ones. I know that my dog has a sense of time, but I have no evidence that it can construct a signalling event to me or another dog to communicate the expectation of me going on holiday and sending it off to the dreaded kennels!

All of this made me wonder how the people in charge of the school system come up with the methods used to train humanity. Do they use threatening circumstances to get kids to become mathematicians? Possibly, but I suspect that approach is not too successful. Is it about “cognition”? Again Popper has a bit of a different view. His conjecture is that we theorise about things, that we see problems, that we attempt solutions before we observe in a directed manner. We seem to have an expectation of events that drives our need to know. I am sure that I am not doing Popper justice, but this is the best I can do on a blog site!

What is more, theorising is connected to being able to tell a story, to imagine a beginning, middle and end, to see causality as a thread during the recounting of something, even if it is imaginary, like a fairy tale. Telling a story is uniquely human it seems, and that brings me to the (possibly) related work of Stephen Denning on Business Narrative. Here stories are used to share learning and discovery. Back to the start of the blog, and we find the cognition elements there, but if we follow Popper and Denning in a logical fashion, it seems that cognition (and learned information) is a result of experience on the back of a theory of possible outcomes and expected problems, and expectations met or refuted, in the real world or in the imaginary world.

Maybe successful learning is a result of such a process, and not just copying of behaviour or patterns. Yes, that may be part of learning, but true knowledge seems to come from some empirical process. I think this means that we must 'learn' to listen to our inner stories, have mind experiments, develop models and stories, expect outcomes and test this against reality. Another important point is that when I talk about "language", I include all the concepts of mathematics and music as well. Just like the construction of conversation in spoken word was learned during childhood, we must learn the concepts of mathematics for example. Again Popper points out that normal children have a priori language abilities...

The core concept is that we need to suggest possible outcomes even before we experience them. From the delta we deduce something new about the world (even if the delta is zero!) and we adapt accordingly.

If someone will tell me a story about Einstein and his problems, his conjectures and theories, then maybe, just maybe, I can be a successful student of relativity theory? Well, it is clearly not as simple as that, because as Popper points out, I must do my own theorising then with what I have heard and with what I expect, build my own expectation set and "solve" the problems from my unique perspective. Just maybe I can find the story that will lead me to new discovery on the back of what I already understand through the manipulation into a causally/logically coherent theory of possible worlds. Maybe a story is at the heart of learning….