Growing identity

In a video cast on TED, Steven Pinker argues that we humans have never lived in such peaceful times, i.e. that violence and aggression has been decreasing for many hundreds of years. Living in Europe, there are still many traces of the many wars between different "tribes" and this made me remember a conversation I had last weekend with a person that grew up imediatly after the world war. He was saying that their highest goal was to have a roof on top and something to eat. Now, our generation must be living in great times, he was arguing. I answered that nowadays the challenge is the quest for identity, as we can easily get lost in the sea of information, certainly in a global world where borders are vanishing. The hierarchy of roles is lowered, and who you want to be, what you want to do, what stories you are going to tell, maybe is equally challenging as finding a place to cover for the rainy days.

Knowing what and knowing how

It is common to ask two sorts of questions when we explore a new world: "What" do we see, feel, experience, know? (structural descriptions) And "how" do we know? (functional descriptions)

Minsky describes that better concepts to represent knowledge would be "actors", "situations" and "actions". Depending on a context (= situation), an actor can issue only a limited set of actions. (Furthermore there is the concept of negative expertise, i.e. know-how that we employ to avoid a paradox.)

It can be argued that knowledge results not so much from learning new skills, but from finding new ways to organize knowledge that someone already has. This is the point of Papert's principle: "Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows."

processing of information

I was reading in a very interesting article about the invention of the Dynabook and Smalltalk, that "hardware is just crystallized software"

http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html