Baby versus Digger

1 year old versus toy digger. Who will win?

The face-off begins:

The two attack head on.
In a surprise move, the baby picks up the digger and eats it.

The stunned digger flails as the baby tosses it around.

Slammed to the ground, the digger becomes unresponsive.

Victorious, the baby struts away to find new toys to dominate.

Baby 1: Toy digger: 0

Conceptual confusion

I noticed a bit of conceptual confusion with my son.  When I ask him what country we live in, he sometimes says Michigan.  Other times, I ask him what state we live in, he'll say North America or Ypsilanti.  Its apparent, he is not understanding he differences between the concepts of state, country, and city.  These ideas are simply too abstract for him to understand.  The word state to him has exact meaning.  He knows it represents some category of geography, but does not recognize the hierarchy of concepts and its placement there-in.

While the concepts of city, state, and country are difficult to understand, he can identify the shape and placement of Michigan on a map of the U.S.  We have a puzzle map of the U.S. that he and his sister love to do.  They are both excellent at doing the puzzle through shape recognition.  They can recite the names of about 6 different states.

This brings up an interesting problem with educating children about geography.  It seems at a young age (my son is 5), they can learn about the names of places where they live, but their conception of such places is so vague as to be next to meaningless.  I have tried to use Google maps and slowly zoom out from our house in order to give him perspective of the size and location.  Yet, after I zoom out further than our route to school, I can't really detect if it means anything to him.  Having children learn the names of the 50 states, country names, continent names, etc. is largely pointless at this age because these names have no meaning to him.  Where I should start?   I would think that names of neighborhood streets and nearby parks would be appropriate.  Maybe even nearby city names.  Any suggestions?

Value-dense life

Updated and expanded at Reason for Success.

Singularity

To end my class in the Intro to Information Systems, I'm exploring future predictions of technology innovation.  There are a lot of interesting predictions, but one that I find fascinating is the idea of the Singularity.

Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has predicted the singularity in about 30 years.  In this Ubiquity interview with Ray, he states his premise:

I make the case that this exponential progression will lead us to an understanding of human intelligence. And by understanding I mean we will have detailed mathematical models and computer simulations of all of the regions of the brain by the mid 2020s. So by the end of the 2020s we'll be able to fully recreate human intelligence. You may wonder: "OK, what's the big deal with that? We already have human intelligence; in fact, we've got six billion human brains running around, so why do we need more?" One of the answers to that question is that it will be a very powerful combination to combine the subtle and supple powers of human pattern recognition with ways in which machines are already superior. 

While I do not doubt our ability to understand pattern recognition to a very great extent, I believe that his definition of intelligence rests primarily on pattern recognition and not concept formation.  It may be possible to simulate concept formation in computers, I'm just not convinced it will be achieved in 20 years.  Regardless of the timeline, the ultimate effect may be profound.

Ray goes on to say:

My second point is that nonbiological intelligence, once it achieves human levels, will double in power every year, whereas human intelligence—biological intelligence—is fixed. We have 10 to the 26th power calculations per second in the human species today, and that's not going to change, but ultimately the nonbiological side of our civilization's intelligence will become by the 2030s thousands of times more powerful than human intelligence and by the 2040s billions of times more powerful. And that will be a really profound transformation.

The difficulty with this statement is how can intelligence be more powerful.  Is it simply faster?  Can it remember more?  Undoubtedly true.  Can it think better?  That is a subject we cannot fathom at this point, but sound highly suspect.

My second difficulty is with the assumption that human do not enhance their own cognitive capacities through integration with computing machines.  Simple electronic interfaces already exist in Cochlear implants, prosthetics, and BrainGate.  In 20 years, we may be able to achieve fantastic integration of computers and brain functionality.  Eventually, we may be able to download our memories or learn new skills Matrix style.

There is also the difficulty of moving this intelligence into economically feasible applications.  As another futurist Max More points out:

I also see a tendency in many projections to take a purely technical approach and to ignore possible economic, political, cultural, and psychological factors that could dampen the advances and their impact.

And to that I agree.

Concepts in learning

I recently ran across two educational psychologists, Ausubel and Novak, that argue for a conceptual basis for learning.  While philosophically, they differ in their definition of concepts with Objectivism, they offer an approach to learning that focuses on conceptual understanding of knowledge, the relationship between concepts and the necessity of context when presenting information to students.  This approach emphasizes the importance of "meaningful learning" as opposed to "rote learning". 

According to Ausubel and Novak, meaningful learning occurs only when new concepts are carefully defined, when examples of the concept  relate to a learner's context, and if the new concept is integrated with the learner’s prior conceptual framework.  Because learners have free will, they must be motivated to integrate the knowledge.  In rote learning, the learner memorizes the conceptual definitions or memorizes the links between concepts without real understanding.  Such rote learning is quickly forgotten.  Meaningful learning and rote learning exist on a continuum.

While I am still in the early stages of reviewing Ausubel's and Novak's research, it looks like a promising research stream.  It reminds me of the approach used at the VanDamme Academy.  If anyone is familiar with their work, I would love to hear your thoughts.