[gumby]

Up to “and the process” yes, this is what Piaget taught. And that learning is a process of comtinuous rewriting of what you think you know, based on your experiences.

Separately: some people, like Spencer, who believe that “progress” has a direction, that “more advanced” societies have more universal knowledge that accumulates like stacking paper on a table, (and this was the challenge of Darwin) that humans are closest to god and all other creatures are inferior (you can see how this extends to a belief that there are different races (=breeds) of humans, both in genetics/god’s engineering and in culture).

Then tying the two together: you can look at the development of an individual human as an iterative, never ending and somewhat meandering process or you can say that you just have to transfer those stacks of paper, bottom to top, and then you’re done.

The connection between the two may sound absurdly tenuous but sad to say it is highly politicized and to this very day affects how schools are organized and funded, culture, politics, beliefs about right and wrong and how people should behave.

[zxcb1]

Ok, thanks! It seems to me that these aren’t mutually exclusive, rather complementary. The embodied approach, reminds me of the Montessori attitude of exploration / discovery and the metaphor of stacked paper, the industrial age, man as machine. How about seeing it as the difference between cultivating (complex, holistic, iterative, like ANNs) vs constructing (simple, compositional) or the principles of intuition and logic? Also, I suppose one may move in the other direction, from higher level conceptual to embodied understanding via iterative refinement.