[extropy-chat] experimentation in young humans

[Alejandro Dubrovsky]

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 20:07 -0700, spike wrote:
> 
> I witnessed an interesting experiment performed by my two month old son.  He
> was in his bouncy chair, which has a favored rattle toy suspended above it.
> He gazed intently at the toy, then suddenly commented YEEEARG and swung his
> arm, which hit the rattle and made a most delightful noise.  (He loves
> noise.  This bodes ill.)  For the next several minutes he YEEEARGed and
> batted the toy.  Then he tried YEEEARGing without swinging the arm.  No
> rattley noise.  So he tried swinging the arm without YEEEARGing.  Rattley
> noise.  He discovered he needs to only swing the arm, and the magic word
> YEEEARG is unnecessary.  At two months he has discovered the value of
> experimentation and evidence based living.
> 
hehe
Here's an AIBO involved in very similar experiments
http://www.csl.sony.fr/Research/Topics/DevelopmentalRobotics/index.html

I don't think the AIBO came to the same metaconclusion on the value of
experimentation though.