¿Y el hobbitttt?

Hola mundo

> Invitado ha escrito:
> Hola mundo from origins, might one not
drift strangely awry? Indeed so, and many people seem quite mad to one
another.

In his book Sentics [l978], the pianist-physiologist Manfred
Clynesdescribes certain specific temporal sensory patterns and claims
that each is associated with a certain common emotional state. For
example, in his experiments, two particular patterns that gently rise
and fall are said to suggest states of love and reverence; two others
(more abrupt) signify anger and hate. He claims that these and other
patterns--he calls them 'sentic'--arouse the same effects through
different senses--that is, embodied as acoustical intensity, or pitch,
or tactile pressure, or even visual motion--and that this is
cross-cultural. The time lengths of these sentic shapes, on the order
of 1 sec, could correspond to parts of musical phrases.

Clynes studied the "muscular" details of instrumental performances
with this in view, and concluded that music can engage emotions
through these sentic signals. Of course, more experiments are needed
to verify that such signals really have the reported effects.
Nevertheless, I would expect to find something of the sort for quite a
different reason: namely, to serve in the early social development of
children. Sentic signals (if they exist) would be quite useful in
helping infants to learn about themselves and others.

All learning theories require brains to somehow impose "values"
implicit or explicit in the choice of what to learn to do. Most such
theories say that certain special signals, called reinforcers, are
involved in this. For certain goals it should suffice to use some
simple, "primary" physiological stimuli like eating, drinking, relief
of physical discomfort.

Human infants must learn social signals, too. The early learning
theorists in this century assumed that certain social sounds (for
instance, of approval) could become reinforcers by association with
innate reinforcers, but evidence for this was never found. If parents
could exploit some innate sentic cues, that mystery might be
explained.

This might also touch another, deeper problem: that of how an infant
forms an image of its own mind. Self-images are important for at least
two reasons. First, external reinforcement can only be a part of human
learning; the growing infant must eventually learn to learn from
within to free itself from its parents. With Freud, I think that
children must replace and augment the outside teacher with a
self-constructed, inner, parent image. Second, we need a self-model
simply to make realistic plans for solving ordinary problems. For
example, we must know enough about our own dispositions to be able to
assess which plans are feasible. Pure self commitment does not work;
we simply cannot carry out a plan that we will find too boring to
complete or too vulnerable to other, competing interests. We need
models of our own behavior. How could a baby be smart enough to build
such a model ?

Innate sentic detectors could help by teaching children about their
own affective states. For if distinct signals arouse specific states,
the child can associate those signals with those states. Just knowing
that such states exist, that is, having symbols for them, is half the
battle. If those signals are uniform enough, then from social
discourse one can learn some rules about the behavior caused by those
states. Thus a child might learn that conciliatory signals can change
anger to affection. Given that sort of information, a simple learning
machine should be able to construct a 'finite-state person model."
This model would be crude at first, but to get started would be half
of the job. Once the baby had a crude model of some other person, it
could be copied and adapted in work on the baby's own self-model.
This is more normative and constructional than it is descriptive, as
Freud hinted, because the self-model dictates more than portrays what
it purports to portray. With regard to music, it seems possible that
we conceal, in the innocent songs and setting of our children's
musical cultures, some lessons about successions of our own affective
states. Sentically encrypted, those ballads could encode instructions
about conciliation and affection, aggression and retreat; precisely
the knowledge of signals and states that we need to get along with
others. In later life, more complex music might illustrate more
intricate kinds of compromise and conflict, ways to fit goals together
to achieve more than one thing at a time. Finally, for grown-ups, our
Burgesses and Kubricks fit Odes to Joy to Clockwork Oranges.

If you find all this farfetched, so do I. But before rejecting it
entirely, recall the question, Why do we have music, and let it occupy
our lives with no apparent reason? When no idea seems right, the right
one must seem wrong.

================ Theme and Thing ================

What is the subject of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? Is it just those
first four notes? Does it include the twin, transposed companion too?
What of the other variations, augmentations, and inversions? Do they
all stem from a single prototype? In this case, yes.

Or do they? For later in the symphony the theme appears in triplet
form to serve as countersubject of the scherzo: three notes and one,
three notes and one, three notes and one, still they make four.
Melody turns into monotone rhythm; meter is converted to two equal
beats. Downbeat now falls on an actual note, instead of a silence.
With all of those changes, the themes are quite different and yet the
same. Neither the form in the allegro nor the scherzo alone is the
prototype; separate and equal, they span musical time.

[Fig. 2 shows the first 25 measures of the 3rd movement.]

Is there some more abstract idea that they both embody? This is like
the problem raised by Wittgenstein of what words like game mean. In my
paper on frames [Minsky 1974], I argue that for vision, chair can be
described by no single prototype; it is better to use several
prototypes connected in relational networks of similarities and
differences I doubt that even these would represent musical ideas
well; there are better tools in conconceptual dependency,
frame-systems, and semantic networks. Those are the tools we use today
to deal with such problems. (See Roads, 1980.)

What is a good theme? Without that bad word good, I do not think the
question is well formed because anything is a theme if everything is
music!

So let us split that question into (1) What mental conditions or
processes do pleasant tunes evoke? and (2) What do we mean by
pleasant? Both questions are hard, but the first is only hard; to
answer it will take much thought and experimentation, which is good.
The second question is very different. Philosophers and scientists
have struggled mightily to understand what pain and pleasure are. I
especially like Dennett's [1978] explanation of why that has been so
difficult. He argues that pain "works" in different ways at different
times, and all those ways have too little in common for the usual
definition. I agree, but if pain is no single thing, why do we talk
and think as though it were and represent it with such spurious
clarity? This is no accident: illusions of this sort have special
uses. They play a role connected with a problem facing any society
(inside or outside the mind) that learns from its experience. The
problem is how to assign the credit and blame, for each accomplishment
or failure of the society as a whole, among the myriad agents involved
in everything that happens. To the extent that the agents' actions are
decided locally, so also must these decisions to credit or blame he
made locally.

How, for example, can a mother tell that her child has a need )or that
one has been satisfied) before she has learned specific signs for each
such need? That could be arranged if, by evolution, signals were
combined from many different internal processes concerned with needs
and were provided with a single, common, output--an infant's sentic
signal of discomfort (or contentment). Such a genetically
pre-established harmony would evoke a corresponding central state in
the parent. We would feel this as something like the distress we feel
when babies cry.

A signal for satisfaction is also needed. Suppose, among the many
things a child does, there is one that mother likes, which she
demonstrates by making approving sounds. The child has just been
walking there, and holding this just so, and thinking that, and
speaking in some certain way. How can the mind of the child find out
which behavior is good? The trouble is, each aspect of the child's
behavior must result from little plans the child made before. We
cannot reward an act. We can only reward the agency that selected that
strategy, the agent who wisely activated the first agent, and so on.
Alas for the generation of behaviorists who wastes its mental life by
missing this plain and simple principle.

To reward all those agents and processes, we must propagate some
message that they all can use to credit what they did; the plans they
made, their strategies and computations. These various recipients have
so little in common that such a message of approval, to work at all,
must be extremely simple. Words like good are almost content-free
messages that enable tutors, inside or outside a society, to tell the
members that one or more of them has satisfied some need, and that
tutor need not understand which members did what, or how, or even why.

Words like 'satisfy' and 'need' have many shifting meanings. Why,
then, do we seem to understand them? Because they evoke that same
illusion of substantiality that fools us into thinking it tautologous
to ask, Why do we like pleasure? This serves a need: the levels of
social discourse at which we use such clumsy words as 'like', or
'good', or 'that was fun' must coarsely crush together many different
meanings or we will never understand others (or ourselves) at all.
Hence that precious, essential poverty of word and sign that makes
them so hard to define. Thus the word 'good' is no symbol that simply
means or designates, as 'table' does. Instead, it only names this
protean injunction: Activate all those unknown processes that
correla

Clasificados
Software
El Tiempo
Subastas
Agenda
Guía e-mail


Horóscopo
Postales
Noticias
Juegos
Correo
Foros


Telefonía
Loterías
Compras
Empresas




Mapa Web
Haz un link
Publicidad
Escríbenos
Aviso legal
Notas de prensa
Trabaja en HispaVista
Investors relations
Atención al usuario: 906 887 116

ojala no se sigan postiando cosas omo estas no ayudan al foro :P