Previous Page Table of Contents Next Page

What are skills, what do they do, and how did they get here?

The innate skill of experimenting

I see experimentation as a method for generating a novel action by more or less randomly modifying an action that is derived from an existing skill. Experimentation thus plays a similar role as the more or less random mixing of the two DNA patterns from the parents. For DNA, the second form of introducing random variations is through mutation. Again, a similar kind of process might happen within the individual to introduce a random variation into an action derived from a skill.

Diagram: Experimentation - producing novel action through random variations of existing action patterns

We assume that the action plan, i.e. the pattern underlying the action, is preserved, so that it can be used to modify a skill or instroduce a new skill if the experiment was successful.

Previous Page Table of Contents Next Page