Page 260 - DCAP310_INTRODUCTION_TO_ARTIFICIAL_INTELLIGENCE_AND_EXPERT_SYSTEMS

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems

Notes Introduction

Learning is acquiring new, or modifying existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or
preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is
possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning
curves. Learning is not compulsory; it is contextual. It does not happen all at once, but builds
upon and is shaped by what we already know. To that end, learning may be viewed as a process,
rather than a collection of factual and procedural knowledge. Learning produces changes in the
organism and the changes produced are relatively permanent.
Human learning may occur as part of education, personal development, schooling, or training.
It may be goal-oriented and may be aided by motivation. The study of how learning occurs is
part of neuropsychology, educational psychology, learning theory, and pedagogy. Learning
may occur as a result of habituation or classical conditioning, seen in many animal species, or as
a result of more complex activities such as play, seen only in relatively intelligent animals.
Learning may occur consciously or without conscious awareness. Learning that an aversive
event can’t be avoided nor escaped is called learned helplessness. There is evidence for human
behavioral learning prenatally, in which habituation has been observed as early as 32 weeks
into gestation, indicating that the central nervous system is sufficiently developed and primed
for learning and memory to occur very early on in development.
Play has been approached by several theorists as the first form of learning. Children experiment
with the world, learn the rules, and learn to interact through play. Lev Vygotsky agrees that
play is pivotal for children’s development, since they make meaning of their environment
through play. 85 percent of brain development occurs during the first five years of a child’s life.
The context of conversation based on moral reasoning offers some proper observations on the
responsibilities of parents.
14.1 Knowledge Acquisition Difficulties

Knowledge acquisition is a method of learning, first proposed by Aristotle in his seminal work
“Organon”. Aristotle proposed that the mind at birth is a blank slate, or tabula rasa. As a blank
slate it contains no knowledge of the objective, empirical universe, nor of itself. As a method, it
is opposed to the concept of “a priori” knowledge, and to “intuition” when conceived as religious
revelation. It has been suggested that the mind is “hard wired” to begin operating at birth,
beginning a lifetime process of acquisition through abstraction, induction, and conception. The
“five senses” referred to by the word sensation are metaphorically the interface between empirical
(sensate) reality and the consciousness of the knowing subject. A knowing subject for the purpose
of this discussion of knowledge acquisition may be defined as any conscious creature capable of
deriving direct and immediate sensate data from its environment. Sensate data, or sensation, are
distinct from perception. Perception is the recognition within the knowing subject of the event
of having had a sensation. The tabula rasa and must learn the nature of sensation as the awareness
of something which is outside itself. Commonly recognized sensory systems are those for
vision, hearing, somatic sensation (touch), taste and olfaction (smell). Perception is the retention
of a group of sensations transmitted through the sensory system(s), which gives the knowing
subject the ability to be aware, not only of the singularity of stimuli presented by sensation
itself, but of an entity, a thing, an existent. Retention of percepts allows the human mind to
abstract information from the percepts. The abstraction is considered the extensional definition
of the percept. An extension is “every object that falls under the definition of the concept or term
in question.” This is the same as a universal (metaphysics) or genus or denotation, or class
(philosophy).

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