Experience Association, Objects, Language, And The Establishment Of Identity

This very thoughtful article linked below does, I think, indicate very clearly, just how important Experience Association, in the broadest range of total environmental effect, is in establishing how human infants learn. And a quote near the beginning only serves to emphasize this:

"...Toco was little more than a camera and microphone mounted on a Meccano frame, and given character with ping-pong-ball eyes, a red feather quiff and crooked yellow bill. But it was smart. Using voice recognition and pattern-analysing algorithms, Roy had painstakingly taught Toco to distinguish words and concepts within the maelstrom of everyday speech. Where previously computers learned language digitally, understanding words in relation to other words, Roy’s breakthrough was to create a machine that understood their relationship to objects. Asked to pick out the red ball among a range of physical items, Toco could do it..."

Can there be meaning before there is an identity, to have a place to refer from, is created? Is this the old chicken and the egg problem in which came first? Or do they both sort of emerge together?
And now we must be concerned with learning in both the Mind meaning space of things, as well as the Body meaning space of things. You need only think of the experiments involving chips denied loving physical context, as they also learned the expressive landscape of their kind, and the realities they have to live in, to understand the importance of "how we learn." And as this article also makes quite clear, it is more than just the number of words thrown at our children (though that difference is stark in terms of economic strata), it is how it is done that is also as important.

Thinking back to my own childhood, and how hard it was for me to focus on being in the now, to do both experience, but also to start associating things, over time, that had common elements that could be, literally, and figuratively, held onto, and remembered, so that the also needed process of separation could begin; that path of starting to distinguish between inner, and outer experience, so that an individual could then begin to emerge. Doing that second part there was very difficult for me, I think, because I was getting a bit too much of pure experience. Fortunately for me, however, is the firm belief in my mind (I know, memory should be taken with great scepticism) that I was only partially autistic. And even though they had great trouble toilet training me (I wet my bed until well into sixth grade). And getting me to focus on the practical "here and now," in general; so much so in fact that I was in the second, or third grade before I could tie my own shoes. It wasn't until the end of the third grade, however, that things changed. In that grade, by prodigious effort I have no recollection of, but by some dint of pure will, my third grade teacher (I think her name was Miss Prinze, or some phonetic cousine to that) finally got phonetics through my head so that I could start learning to sound things out with the sound symbols; because that's when I realized that is what they were. And by the fifth and sixth grades I was finally starting to get a sense of me as something unique; and a part of a bunch of other "uniques" as people who could be parents, friends, bullys, or something very special indeed, inspiring lights of illumination (my sixth grade teacher was one, as well as my friend Greg's step father, Darrell -- a guy just born to do community as a scout master, electrical lineman for Puget Power, and involved in search and rescue, as I recall). I was also then, by the end of the sixth grade, able to read at about a thousand words a minute, and still retain what I was reading. And the really odd thing there, because they were so influenced by the whole "Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics," and were quick always to want to test and make sure it was delivering as promised; I also immediately gained an amazing insight: It's not enough to just be able to read it, you had to understand what you read; which just as immediately clicked into being a dictate: try to absorb it deeply, in every way you can, because in some way, shape, or form, you will be tested. Always.

My big mistake initially was in thinking that this constant testing was only something that happened to me. Having a severely crippled younger brother suddenly come into your life, and parents who became even more destructively codependent on each other because of it, with your sisters and you having to have to become parents, by default, more and more, as the years then went on, will tend to do that to you, but then reading also let me eventually know that there was oh so much more to it. That and a hell of a lot of mistakes I made trying to do balance when I didn't even fully understand it yet.

In any case, though, it is still my contention that we will not get learning right until we can get redefining work right. And we can't get that right until we accept that Capitalism must go.

It is done. It has had its time. It is now time for a new approach. One that will let us integrate learning, and teaching, as a continuous, ongoing process that everybody should be participating in; trying always to do it in a thoughtful. loving way. If we can do that we will be making a huge leap for what we can achieve in always passing on the ability for new individuals to be able to make better choices in life. And if we can do that there is truly nothing the human race cannot accomplish.

How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete