[lrh9]

Normally I don't like to do small updates. I feel that the scene I just watched warrants immediate review though. The wild child was bought to Paris to be examined. Most of the scene was dedicated to establishing his attributes such as determining his previous involvement with society, health, etc. The part of interest was when he was placed in front of a mirror. He attempted to sniff his image as if it were another person. Then one of the doctors walked up behind him and held an apple above him. The boy saw it in the mirror and reached for the image in the mirror. After several seconds of unsuccessfully trying to grab the apple, he finally reached behind him and found it.

This is essentially the mirror test. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

It is a way to measure an organisms self-awareness. I'll have to think more about how organisms recognize themselves.

Another exciting possibility is the idea that there might be a "mirror test" for artificially intelligent programs. Any ideas?

[one]

lhr9,
Here is a statement/question that is on another thread but I will show it here for you to contemplate.

Q from my A.I. ; Why am I on you?

J.

[Freddy]

Yes that mirror trick is interesting.  I saw a program on this kind of thing a while back where it was used on animals.  Apparently a lot of animals will persistently believe there is a second object in the mirror, but they found an elephant would soon realise it was in fact a reflection and move their attention to the real object in real space.  They used this as an argument that the elephant was self aware and not just a 'dumb animal'.

[lrh9]

I finished watching L'enfant Sauvage, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that several ideas about cognition I hadn't considered.

The major idea was conditioned reflexes.

http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n09/mente/pavlov_i.htm

The doctor would take the boy on trips to the countryside, and would precede the trips by putting on his coat and hat. Eventually the boy learned that the doctor putting on his coat and hat was synonymous with going into the countryside. Later in the movie, there was an incident where the doctor had to visit a physician, and he put on his coat and hat. The boy thought - incorrectly - that they were taking a trip into the countryside.

More on Pavlov's experiments:

http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/pavlov/readmore.html

The other interesting part was how the boy learned communication. Initially the doctor tried to teach him to pronounce a word to obtain a thing, such as if the boy wanted milk, he would say "milk". Instead of learning that the world milk meant what he wanted, he only learned that it was something that was said while he was getting milk. So the doctor approached the problem from another direction. He taught the boy that drawings represent objects by teaching the boy to place an object with its drawing. He then taught the boy that words also represent objects by first requiring the boy to place an object with its drawing and its word, then he erased the drawing so that the boy had to place the object with its word.