Page 231 - Deep Learning

214 Adaptation

A constraint base – the set of constraints a person believes hold in a
domain of activity – is processed by matching the relevance patterns of all
constraints against the situation at hand. The satisfaction patterns of those
constraints that have matching relevance patterns are also matched against
the current situation. If no constraints have matching relevance patterns
or all constraints that have matching relevance patterns also have match-
ing satisfaction patterns, then the situation is consistent with the person’s
declarative knowledge. If at least one constraint with a matching relevance
pattern has a nonmatching satisfaction pattern, then the new situation vio-
lates that constraint and this tells the person that he has made an error.
The set of constraints serves as a self-monitoring device by which the mind
can judge the correctness of the solution path constructed by its (possibly
incomplete or incorrect) practical knowledge. For example, cognitive psy-
chologist Carl Martin Allwood concluded from a detailed study of errors in
statistics problem solving that error detection occurs “when the problem
solver perceives a discrepancy between the activity or result he or she has
18
produced and one or more of his or her expectations.” In general, errors
appear subjectively as constraint violations, mismatches between the satis-
faction conditions of one or more constraints and the actual properties of
the situation at hand.
Constraints generate expectations. When a relevance pattern is satisfied,
there is an expectation that the corresponding satisfaction condition will be
satisfied as well. In the normal course of everyday events, we are not aware that
we anticipate effects and events. The fact that our minds are always one step
ahead of the current state of the world becomes obvious when an expectation
is violated. Imagine someone opening what looks like the front door of a house
only to find a brick wall two feet from his nose. The resulting reaction shows
that his mind was not neutral with respect to the unknowns on the other side
of that door; if no hypothesis, expectation or prediction was unconsciously
entertained, why the surprise? We are constantly applying knowledge about
the world to anticipate the outcomes of our actions, even when we are not
aware of doing so. The machinery for executing a constraint base is a hypoth-
19
esis about how this is done. The totality of the satisfaction conditions for all the
constraints with matching relevance conditions is the person’s set of expecta-
tions about the current situation.
How wide a swath of declarative knowledge can be reconceptualized as
consisting of constraints rather than propositions? Not only traffic laws but
also other types of conventions, from punctuation rules, Robert’s Rules of
Order and table manners to the rules for tic-tac-toe and the seating protocol