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The document tree is shown below. the Sokolov's idea was that you must be producing a complex internal model of the world that in concordance with the world across pretty much every perceptible dimension because if you weren't doing that how in the world would you know that the tone had changed from what you had already learned about it and so for the longest time and this was also true for people who are investigating artificial intelligence we had this idea that what people did was make a complex model of the world and hold it in there in their mind so to speak and then they'd act in the world and they compare what they expected to happen in the world with the model and as long as there was a match then there was no orienting reflex no the orienting reflex turns out to be quite a complex reflex it's not merely an alteration in skin conductance what it is in essence is the manner in which you start to unfold your response to the unknown and the initial stages of that are very very quick but it's hard to tell when the orienting reflex stops and when more complex learning begins they sort of shade into one another so the initial stages of the orienting reflex are quite reflexive but the later stages can be extraordinarily complex so for example well I always think the example of betrayal is the best one because because it's so complex so imagine that you know you come home and you find evidence lipstick or something like that evidence that the person that you're with is betraying you the first thing that's going to happen is that you're going to orient there's going to be a real shock and that's a reflexive it's very much akin to the response that you're going to that you would manifest if you saw a predator or snake or something like that and so that's very instantaneous you know and then that'll prepare you for action you'll get you'll get ready to do whatever it is that you need to do next of the very unpleasant thing but then it might take you even years to fully manifest the learning that would be necessary in a situation like that because there's so many things that you have to reconsider first of all the person might now appear to you as a threat that's pretty immediate so there's a biological physiological response first your body reacts first then you respond emotionally that's going to take a while and you know that emotional response might extend over days or weeks or months or even years and then as you're doing that as well you're going to try to start to re sort out your interpretive schema so that it can adjust to the transformation that this this this error on your part say or this catastrophe or this betrayal it has to adjust to whatever information that event contains and so the orienting reflex can manifest itself over an extraordinarily long period of time it's best to think about it as the initial part of what can be a very complex learning process now that was standard that was a standard idea in psychology for the longest period of time that we created a detailed internal model of the world we watched how the world was unfolding we compared the two and the physiology the neurophysiology of this was even understood to some degree even by the Russians in the early 1960s because they basically localized you could use complex EEG electroencephalogram technology to localize where the orienting reflex was occurring in the brain and basically it appeared to occur roughly speaking in the hippocampus and the theory arose that your brain your cortex let's say produced a very complex model of the world an internal model and your senses were producing a model of the external world and the hippocampus was watching those two things to see if they matched and if they didn't match there was a mismatch signal and that would be the orantium reflex and then your body would start to prepare would prepare itself for whatever that mismatch meant and then you would engage in exploratory behavior to try to update your model that was the standard theory it was very well accepted theory it has elements of cybernetic theory in it but it was well accepted enough so that when people first started to experiment with artificial intelligence that's how they tried to make artificially intelligent systems they tried to make ones that would model the world and then act and then compare the changes in the world to that model but that didn't go anywhere as it turned out because it it turned out that it's so it's so difficult to see and model the world that people had people had no idea how complex that was it was impossibly complex as it turned out and so that's part of the reason we don't have robots wandering around doing apparently simple things like walking when a walking in an environment like this now when we look at the environment we think well it's not that much difference not that hard to look at its full of objects and they're just self evident there they are and we can just wander through it you know and we don't even do that consciously to any great degree because so much of that perception is presented to our consciousness without effort in some sense but the AI guys learn pretty quick that perceiving the world was way more difficult than anybody had guests and then this experiment really in some sense put the phenomenological put a phenomenological punch behind that observation because one of the presuppositions of the orienting reflex theory that I just laid out was that you were very good at detecting changes that your nervous system would automatically detect change anomaly right any mismatch between your model and what you expected and then well the AI guys I think figured out first of all that that was a big problem that the problem of perception was much more complicated than that you know it's actually it's out of that same set of observations in some sense that postmodernism emerged in literature because in literary criticism because well it turns out to be hard enough to see a normal object like a chair and part of that is is they know if you just do that to the chair it's really different than it was before you could imagine how different it would be if you tried to paint the chair under both those conditions right and if you were really got good at looking at it you'd find that even though if I asked you what color this is you'd say white if you were actually painting it you'd find out that the colors of the chair when it's in that location and the colors in the chair when it's in that location just because of the difference in lighting are substantially different I think it was Monet I think who painted a very large series of haystacks in French countryside right under in different seasons and under different conditions of illumination just because he was exploring how radically different the same object could be as it moved through contexts and so it isn't even obvious why we think this is the same object when you move it and the answer is something like well you can sit on it in both positions which is not a description of an object by the way right that's a description of something that's useful something that's a tool something that existed relationship to your body it's not an object and so if you think that just looking at something like a chair is almost impossibly difficult and subject to interpretation they'd imagine how difficult it is to perceive something like a text you know like a novel because the novel object obviously is subject to multiple interpretations how many interpretations are going to depend on well at least in principle on the intent conscious and unconscious of the author of the time of the place of the culture of the language then that's just on the side of the production itself but then there's the reader it's like I've read books when I was 16 and then reread them say when I was 40 in the book was almost completely different as far as I was concerned partly because I knew it I knew what was in it the second time and I didn't know what was in it the first time and so the the meaning that manifests itself out of a book is a consequence of all the complexity of the book plus all the complexity of the reader and so you know if you if you're reading Russian literature for example and you've already read 50 50 Russian novels you're going to be in a much more different you're going to be in a different interpretive space than you are if say the Russian novel is the first novel you've ever read and so and the postmodernists were grappling with this as well as with many other ideas that I think contaminated their thinking and their conclusion was well you can't extract out a canonical meaning from a text it's so dependent on the situation that to say the text has a interpretable meaning is actually an error now just because it's difficult to do something doesn't mean it's impossible and there's massive holes in the postmodernist view as far as I think it's an unbelievably pathological view personally but but the thing is is that there are reasons why it emerged and the reasons were analogous to the reasons that the AI project initially fail
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