I’ve gotten to working on Caroline anew, in case you haven’t already noticed. However, I have begun thinking pretty long-range, and I’m very troubled by a very key flaw in the whole design that either I had not thought about previously, or that I have but just forgot (in which case it will be interesting to compare this entry to that previously existing one).
In any case, here’s the issue: suppose that we have a pair of twins. At birth, one of them is placed in solitary confinement – the stereotypical dark, empty dungeon; the other is raised normally. Yes, I know that is very cruel, but this is completely hypothetical. Now, you give each the exact same education (same textbooks, same teachers, etc.), except the one in the dungeon has no sense-based materials (CDs, photographs, etc.) to work with. In the end, they are grown up and both have a healthy amount of knowledge. However, the one who was denied the usage of his senses in learning would completely fail to have the practical ability to discern the colors by sight, recognize what is teriyaki and what is boiled corn by smell, or tell you whether the first person he sees running is running quickly or slowly. He would of course be able to recite the differences, but these differences would mean to him something completely different than it would mean to the other twin.
As much as I believe that one can achieve great things through thought alone, how can I expect Caroline to have a start on anything without being able to ask the most fundamental of questions: holding an object up to me and asking, “What is this?” Pointing to a face and asking, “Who is this?” A child probably learns 99% of things through these two questions. Consider the way we define trees. Most people would say that they are very large plants. Of course, being large has almost nothing to do with being a tree; all trees start quite small, and many end up smaller than other plants. But why does the size matter so much to us, then? Because when we were little, we saw the big ones and pointed to them, asking, “What is that?” And so, we decided that trees are all big. We did not understand, at that point, any of the biology behind being a tree; we didn’t even know that trees were necessarily alive. But we already could talk about trees effectively; we could pick out trees in our field of view; we could draw trees.
Anyhow, I must get to work. And plus I’m increasingly convinced that I’ve already written this entry a few months ago.
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