Some
Grand Simplicities--
What Else Can You Notice Them
Predicting Or Accounting For in YOUR Life?
Laws of Nature
- patterns running throughout the universe and throughout our lives,
which science has attempted to recognize and describe. Find what
the pattern is and you can anticipate, account for, understand and
predict what's happening.
Stuff going
on at first looks very complicated until we have a way to
sort out our perceptions of it and make sense of them. --Until
we catch the pattern of what's going on there. Once we have the
pattern or sense of it, it is very simple, very elegant and usually,
like a snowflake, very beautiful.
Problem: because
they do pervade, the more general of these laws are at first
hard for us to notice, just like it's hard for a fish to notice
that he's wet. Pervading all of life and experience, it's hard to
find "dry" and so contrast experience enough to notice.
Unified Field
Theory - the more general or encompassing the law being described,
the more powerful, with other laws an example of it. Because of
the experience-contrast problem, though, the harder it is to find
the most general laws to describe and focus on. Reaching for generality,
we still need the description to be specific and exact enough to
usefully account for and predict what's happening. Like the Holy
Grail or Philosopher's Stone, finding the most precise/most general
descriptive law, the Unified Field Theory, has been the quest of
much of science since Einstein.
En route
to the Unified Field Theory, we find one major step of that
snowflake: the Law of Effect - you get more of what you reinforce.
It is so pervasively a law of nature because of another law, selection:
to last awhile, any complex homeostatic system HAS to be
susceptible to the effects of its own presence, its own actions,
in a changing world. It HAS to perceive its feedbacks and
adapt to them, it HAS to be susceptible to reinforcement, in
order to survive. Any systems without that feature get selected
out, their elements returned to the soup. All complex arrangements
around us and within us, living and non-living, are susceptible
to and responsive in varying degree to their feedbacks, i.e. reinforcement.
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How
All complex
arrangements around us and within us tend to be self-organizing,
complexly homeostatic (self-maintaining/stabilizing systems)
responsive to reinforcement/feedback, hence subject to the Law
of Effect. (They fall into that pattern of behavior: not because
someone passed a law, but because that is simply the pattern running
in their behavior. --Just like the "law of gravity:" no
one passed any law that if someone steps off a cliff or a high rooftop
that he must be, as a penalty/sanction/punishment be dashed to smithereens
below - it;s just part of the pattern of how things are running
in that regard.)
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It follows from
(it's a piece of that pattern, a branch of that snowflake) the Law
of Effect being made so pervasive by the law of selection, that complex
arrangements such as ourselves, such as we comprise, and such as we
are comprised of,tend to be:
Self-organizing
systems susceptible to reinforcement, incorporating some of that
feedback back into our own on-going evolution. SOME. We maintain
who/what we are, but we change to meet what's going on in the world
as it changes around us. This is WHY:
> We learn
best mainly from feedback/reinforcement on our own activities, rather
than from what's done to us. We each preserve our integrity as an
ongoing system, but still have to change to accommodate changes
around us.
Socrates, Maria
Montessori, and O.K.Moore learned ways to elicit those behaviors
from learners whose feedback/reinforcements would be most productive
of learning. Montessori and Moore learned to rig the environment
to selectively reinforce in desired directions from the spontaneous
activities of the learner.
> Santiago
Ramon y Cajal (The Histology of the Brain encyclopedia from
1911 and from that, in English, the excerpt published in Charles
C. Thomas, Inc., Vertebrate Neurogenesis), hailed as the
father of neuroanatomy but his main point overlooked by our neurologists
nonetheless, what develops a nerve cell, a nerve circuit, the very
brain itself:
--Is not genetics
though that plays a role;
--Is not nutrition though that plays a role;
--Is not stimulus though that plays a role;
it is that form of stimulus which is feedback (reinforcement)
on one's own activities.
Marion Diamond
showed the same thing in her rat studies which showed that when
rats were placed in highly stimulating environments but were not
allowed to play with the toys themselves, simply look over the shoulders
of those rats who were, their brains were as thoroughly shriveled
as those of rats raised in stimulus-deprived isolation.
Predict
from this pattern:
* Learning
passively from TV or the media is brain-shriveling even when the
contents are good.
* Learning
passively from didactic passive lecture is brain-shriveling even
when the contents are good.
* Learning
by exploring, doing, playing, and from examining as sensitively
as possible your own perceptions instead of someone else's nth-hand
information, is productive of learning.
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©1998 by Project Renaissance (regarding this internet version
only, other copyrights may apply). While we encourage the free distribution
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