| Annotation Metadata
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^"permissions":^"read":ӶӺ,"update":ӶӺ,"delete":ӶӺ,"admin":ӶӺ°,"user":^"id":6,"name":"Sarah Oberbichler"°,"id":"Hc6qkdd8bl","ranges":Ӷ^"start":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ14Ӻ","startOffset":377,"end":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ14Ӻ","endOffset":3640°Ӻ,"quote":"In order to become a reference item, the object has to be cut loose from its original context where it was a more or less relevant sensory adjunct to an activity cluster, and it must become something very like a “representation”. This is the same development that every normal child goes through on his way to acquiring the concept of “object permanence”, when he begins to “externalize” his perceptual constructs.Ӷ23Ӻ Operationally this transfer is perhaps not so astonishing. The learning process already required that the organism be able to retrieve a recorded action program and to implement it in an effector channel as an actual activity. The transfer of a recorded cluster of sensory signals to a channel other than the one in which the cluster originated is no different in principle. The revolutionary aspect is that this cluster of sensory signals is now placed in the position of a reference value and that the feedback loop which it controls becomes a phase in the activity cycle of an already operating feedback loop. To use a fashionable word, it becomes “embedded” in another loop and, whenever it is called into action, its specific reference item temporarily supersedes the reference value of that other loop. \nDuBrul has expressed the same idea in somewhat different terms: “Information from a new monitoring feedback circuit has captured the final common path” Ӷ24Ӻ. He proposes a neurological hypothesis as to how such a development might come about. I am in no way competent to evaluate its plausibility. Instead, I shall cite a well-known example to show that some such development must have taken place: the termite-fishing chimpanzees that Jane van Lawick-Goodall has filmedӶ25Ӻ. The remarkable feature is not that a chimpanzee, at some time, incorporated the use of a twig into the presumably already established activity chain (or program) of termite-finding and -eating. Such incorporation of items, modifying or extending an organism’s repertoire, must obviously happen very frequently. But when the chimpanzee “chooses” a twig, breaks it from the shrub, strips off the leaves, and takes it to the termite heap where it is going to be used for “fishing”, then a totally new feedback loop controlling the modification of the twig, has been embedded in the larger loop that controls the finding and eating of termites. It does not matter much if the activities which are now put into the service of the subsidiary feedback loop had already been coordinated and recorded as program in some other operational chain. What does matter is that they are now detached from that original chain (say, tearing leaves off a branch in order to eat them) and inserted into an activity chain where they reduce feedback that is negative in relation to a different reference value (tearing off leaves in order to transform a twig into a stick-like tool)Ӷ26Ӻ. The reference item of this embedded loop is also qualitatively different from those of the primary loops, in that it is constituted by an individually coordinated cluster of perceptual signals and not by one of the original homeostatic values that control the organism’s biological functions. In this sense we could, indeed, call this new reference item and the cycle it controls “artificial”.","highlights":Ӷ^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°,^"jQuery321084609571877238732":^°°Ӻ,"text":"","order":"mw-content-text","category":"Argumentation2","data_creacio":1567708976197°
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