On Sat, 24 Aug 1996, jack hirschfeld wrote:
> Not long ago I attended a session with Peter Senge where he expressed the
> view that *unlearning* the "intuitive" ideas about balance, angular
> momentum and system dynamics which we learn when we learn how to walk is
> the hard part of learning how to ride a bicycle.
That's saying a lot. It says intuition -- at least the kind we put in
quotes -- has or is associated with ideas, and that these are or may be
learned ideas (rather than e.g. innate ones).
Yeah, I think I like that. Many people, of course, use a word like
"intuition" for mysteriously occult or inexplicable ways of knowing
something -- and I've always had trouble with that. But on the other hand
my own intuitive knowing is strong and vivid and immediate, and I can't
believe for even a single instant that it's some kind of subliminal
reasoning process (the other extreme from the occult).
And of course if intuition were really mysterious and inexplicable, we
wouldn't be able to unlearn it at all now, would we. How could I unlearn
something that I didn't learn in the first place?
We never, perhaps, learn just one determinate thing at a time. A child
learning to walk is integrating an awful lot of sensory and kinesthetic
stuff with even more decision-tree logic, true. Senge implies -- and I
think I agree -- that this in turn generates some notions -- I would call
them projective notions -- of 'balance, angular momentum, and system
dynamics' which are true for a system consisting of only a single human
body and a floor and walls, but false for a system consisting of a single
human body on a bicycle.
Well, maybe the "unlearning" operation we're referring to here consists
of setting - or discovering - bounds to some previously unbounded (and I
keep wanting to insert "projected" or "projective" here). So that the new
truth we have to accept is not, formally,
"A (which I used to believe without reservation) is FALSE" [1]
but rather
"A is false under conditions x,y, and z" [2]
Certainly the latter process looks a LOT more like real learning to me
than the former one. But it also looks a bit more - um - difficult.
Imagine some learning process built up of umpty-ump iterations of [2];
imagine all those little xyz conditions accumulating and accumulating.
Those get very scary very quickly.
Maybe that's part of why for every person or group or Organization that
Learns by [2], there are hundreds that learn, or think they do, or pretend
to, by [1] -- discarding, one after another, an unending succession of
beliefs-without-reservation-that-have-now-been-shown-to-be-false.
Have a nice day.
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen jamzen@world.std.com
web residence at http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
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