Metaphorical motion in mathematical reasoning: further evidence for pre-motor implementation of structure mapping in abstract domains

Levin

2022

Entropy

Self Cite

113

One of the most salient features of life is its capacity to handle novelty and namely to thrive and adapt to new circumstances and changes in both the environment and internal components. An understanding of this capacity is central to several fields: the evolution of form and function, the design of effective strategies for biomedicine, and the creation of novel life forms via chimeric and bioengineering technologies. Here, we review instructive examples of living organisms solving diverse problems and propose competent navigation in arbitrary spaces as an invariant for thinking about the scaling of cognition during evolution. We argue that our innate capacity to recognize agency and intelligence in unfamiliar guises lags far behind our ability to detect it in familiar behavioral contexts. The multi-scale competency of life is essential to adaptive function, potentiating evolution and providing strategies for top-down control (not micromanagement) to address complex disease and injury. We propose an observer-focused viewpoint that is agnostic about scale and implementation, illustrating how evolution pivoted similar strategies to explore and exploit metabolic, transcriptional, morphological, and finally 3D motion spaces. By generalizing the concept of behavior, we gain novel perspectives on evolution, strategies for system-level biomedical interventions, and the construction of bioengineered intelligences. This framework is a first step toward relating to intelligence in highly unfamiliar embodiments, which will be essential for progress in artificial intelligence and regenerative medicine and for thriving in a world increasingly populated by synthetic, bio-robotic, and hybrid beings.

“…Many fascinating conceptual links can be developed to work on embodied premotor cognition in math, causal reasoning, general planning, etc. [ 209 , 210 , 211 ].…”

Section: Implications: a Research Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments

Levin

2022

Entropy

Self Cite

113

“…Whether duplication-with-modification mechanisms acting on knowledge "modules" can be demonstrated in, e.g., category learning, remains to be determined. The common use of analogy in abstract category learning [195][196][197] suggests that this may be common. The ubiquity of duplication-with-modification of instruction modules as a mechanism for producing progressively more complex memes is well recognized [160,170].…”

Section: A Spectrum Of Observersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sciences of Observation

2018

Philosophies

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Multiple sciences have converged, in the past two decades, on a hitherto mostly unremarked question: what is observation? Here, I examine this evolution, focusing on three sciences: physics, especially quantum information theory, developmental biology, especially its molecular and “evo-devo” branches, and cognitive science, especially perceptual psychology and robotics. I trace the history of this question to the late 19th century, and through the conceptual revolutions of the 20th century. I show how the increasing interdisciplinary focus on the process of extracting information from an environment provides an opportunity for conceptual unification, and sketch an outline of what such a unification might look like.

“…As visual imagination is implemented by excitations of the same intermediate visual and visuo-motor pathways as visual perception (reviewed by Kosslyn et al, 2006; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009), any event that can be visualized can be used as input to a structure mapping inference by the human pre-motor action planning system. Functional imaging studies indicate that pre-motor force-motion scaling implements structure-mapping analogies both in abstract but visualizable domains involving forces and motions (Fields, 2012b) and in formal domains representing metaphorical motions (Fields, 2013b). …”

Section: Mechanism-driven Causation As An Obligate Analog Of Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Motion, identity and the bias toward agency

2014

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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The well-documented human bias toward agency as a cause and therefore an explanation of observed events is typically attributed to evolutionary selection for a “social brain”. Based on a review of developmental and adult behavioral and neurocognitive data, it is argued that the bias toward agency is a result of the default human solution, developed during infancy, to the computational requirements of object re-identification over gaps in observation of more than a few seconds. If this model is correct, overriding the bias toward agency to construct mechanistic explanations of observed events requires structure-mapping inferences, implemented by the pre-motor action planning system, that replace agents with mechanisms as causes of unobserved changes in contextual or featural properties of objects. Experiments that would test this model are discussed.