Embodied Cognition and iCub

An iCub robot mounted on a supporting frame. The robot is 104 cm high and weighs around 22 kg

An iCub is a 1 metre high humanoid robot testbed for research into human cognition and artificial intelligence.

Systems that perceive, understand and act

It was designed by the RobotCub Consortium, of several European universities and is now supported by other projects such as ITALK.^[1] The robot is open-source, with the hardware design, software and documentation all released under the GPL license. The name is a partial acronym, cub standing for Cognitive Universal Body.^[2] Initial funding for the project was €8.5 million from Unit E5 – Cognitive Systems and Robotics – of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme, and this ran for six years from 1 September 2004 until 1 September 2010.^[2]

The motivation behind the strongly humanoid design is the embodied cognition hypothesis, that human-like manipulation plays a vital role in the development of human cognition. A baby learns many cognitive skills by interacting with its environment and other humans using its limbs and senses, and consequently its internal model of the world is largely determined by the form of the human body. The robot was designed to test this hypothesis by allowing cognitive learning scenarios to be acted out by an accurate reproduction of the perceptual system and articulation of a small child so that it could interact with the world in the same way that such a child does.^[3]

 See Also: RoboCub

In philosophy, the embodied mind thesis holds that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. Philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers who study embodied cognition and the embodied mind argue that all aspects of cognition are shaped by aspects of the body. The aspects of cognition include high level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and human performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgement). The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, the body's interactions with the environment (situatedness) and the ontological assumptions about the world that are built into the body and the brain.

The embodied mind thesis is opposed to other theories of cognition such as cognitivism, computationalism and Cartesian dualism.^[1] The idea has roots in Kant and 20th century continental philosophy (such as Merleau-Ponty). The modern version depends on insights drawn from recent research in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics and neurobiology.

Embodied cognition is a topic of research in social and cognitive psychology, covering issues such as social interaction and decision-making.^[2] Embodied cognition reflects the argument that the motor system influences our cognition, just as the mind influences bodily actions. For example, when participants hold a pencil in their teeth engaging the muscles of a smile, they comprehend pleasant sentences faster than unpleasant ones.^[3] And it works in reverse: holding a pencil in their teeth to engage the muscles of a frown increases the time it takes to comprehend pleasant sentences.^[3]

George Lakoff (a cognitive scientist and linguist) and his collaborators (including Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and Rafael E. Núñez) have written a series of books promoting and expanding the thesis based on discoveries in cognitive science, such as conceptual metaphor and image schema.^[4]

Robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec and Rolf Pfeifer have argued that true artificial intelligence can only be achieved by machines that have sensory and motor skills and are connected to the world through a body.^[5] The insights of these robotics researchers have in turn inspired philosophers like Andy Clark and Horst Hendriks-Jansen.^[6]

Neuroscientists Gerald Edelman, António Damásio and others have outlined the connection between the body, individual structures in the brain and aspects of the mind such as consciousness, emotion, self-awareness and will.^[7] Biology has also inspired Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson to develop a closely related version of the idea, which they call enactivism.^[8] The motor theory of speech perception proposed by Alvin Liberman and colleagues at the Haskins Laboratories argues that the identification of words is embodied in perception of the bodily movements by which spoken words are made.^{[9][10][11][12][13]}

The mind-body problem is a philosophical problem arising in the fields of metaphysics and philosophy of mind.^[2] The problem arises because mental phenomena arguably differ, qualitatively or substantially, from the physical body on which they apparently depend. There are a few major theories on the resolution of the problem. Dualism is the theory that the mind and body are two distinct substances,^[2] and monism is the theory that they are, in reality, just one substance. Monist materialists (also called physicalists) take the view that they are both matter, and monist idealists take the view that they are both in the mind. Neutral monists take the view that both are reducible to a third, neutral substance.

The problem was identified by René Descartes in the sense known by the modern Western world, although the issue was also addressed by pre-Aristotelian philosophers,^[3] in Avicennian philosophy,^[4] and in earlier Asian traditions.

A dualist view of reality may lead one to consider the corporeal as little valued^[3] and trivial. The rejection of the mind–body dichotomy is found in French Structuralism, and is a position that generally characterized post-war French philosophy.^[5] The absence of an empirically identifiable meeting point between the non-physical mind and its physical extension has proven problematic to dualism and many modern philosophers of mind maintain that the mind is not something separate from the body.^[6] These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, particularly in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences.^{[7][8][9][10]}

Relativism

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1914 Max von Laue

I am not sure what I can add other then what I have already been saying toward logical deduction....I still need to get a handle on the essence of what is being said here in opening thread.

So with what I looked at, can we say that the deductive recognition of lets say symmetry would be in contrast to how you might look at the world in a relativistic sense versus Platonism.

See: Against Symmetry

This setting was used more I think in terms of how a scientist is explaining himself and his relationship with the way in which he had approached science.....yet I could see there were scientist who had adopted the Platonic Tradition. Example of Penrose and Coxeter were demonstrative of this idea?

5.4.3 Platonism and Relativism

Platonism is a family of views that get their name because they involve entities--propositions, properties, sets--which, like Plato's Forms, are held to be abstract, immutable things that exist outside space and time. On many platonistic approaches, concepts express abstract properties and beliefs are relations between people and abstract propositions. This suggests a way around some types of relativism, since people in quite different cultures could have many of the same beliefs (because they could believe the same abstract propositions), and a belief would be true just in case the immutable proposition it expresses is true.

The relativist may reply that platonistic accounts lead to severe difficulties in epistemology and semantics. The problem is that we are physical organisms living in a spatio-temporal world, and we cannot interact causally (or in any other discernible way) with abstract, causally inert things. Moreover, few people are aware of having any special cognitive faculty that puts them in touch with a timeless realm of abstract objects, neuroscientists have never found any part of the brain that subserves such an ability, such a view is not suggested by what is known about the ways children acquire concepts and beliefs, and nothing in physics suggests any way in which a physical system (the brain) can make any sort of contact with causally inert, non-physical objects. Moreover, if our minds cannot make epistemic contact with such things, it is difficult to see how our words and linguistic practices can make semantic contact with them.

None of this proves that abstract propositions don't exist, but it shows it isn't obvious that they do. There have been few debates between relativists and platonists over such matters, however, perhaps because the two views lie so far apart that their proponents cannot easily engage one another.

So these were two positions that were adopted within the push toward understanding the basis of science and it's mathematics.

In theory model development was pushed forward on the basis of such adoptions. Loop Quantum Gravity?

Quasicrystal: Prof. Dan Shechtman

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Just throwing some stuff together in order to understand the extent of relativism as a universal truth, while seeking to understand the subjective realism that make up our individuality. As a layman I do not know if it will be useful under that admittance. You can judge for yourself of course.

Most people think of "seeing" and "observing" directly with their senses. But for physicists, these words refer to much more indirect measurements involving a train of theoretical logic by which we can interpret what is "seen."- Lisa Randall

If one was to solidify some basis to truth how would this be done? The question of a logic oriented view for me saw a basis in what Penrose was explaining using his Twistors, as a foundation in incorporating Fuzzy logic?

While examining the psychological model of Venn logic and TA combined, it was important that there be some relative framework for such a subjective interpretation of a logic orientated world. How subjectively could this have been managed?


Perspective of the Theoretical Scientist

So you have this history and theoretical perspective that sees the world in one way or another? How do you reduce it to a process through Computing that establishes a basis in machining the effects of [and\or-so that we say a statement is .7 true and .3 false.]? We've created a space in between a true and false statement?

DNA computing is a form of computing which uses DNA, biochemistry and molecular biology, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies. DNA computing, or, more generally, molecular computing, is a fast developing interdisciplinary area. Research and development in this area concerns theory, experiments and applications of DNA computing See:DNA computing

Entanglement then provides for other understanding then of a framework that sees the interrogation of a subjective world?

Do we selectively ignore other models from artificial intelligence such as Zadeh's Fuzzy Logic? This is a logic used to model perception and used in newly designed "smart" cameras. Where standard logic must give a true or false value to every proposition, fuzzy logic assigns a certainty value between zero and one to each of the propositions, so that we say a statement is .7 true and .3 false. Is this theory selectively ignored to support our theories? Ideas on Quantum Interrogation

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Geometry Leads us to the Truth?

Part of the realism here for me is the idea that such patterns established deep within our psyche are inherent in each of us as an image first to our awareness, but encompasses a geometric patten of sorts. This was part of the work I did on myself as I explored the realm of dreams. The idea then manifested in what was the basis of this thought process as mandala in origins. A historical vision of an ancient idea of model building. In today's world I thought this as appropriate toward how theoretical ideas are built around a whole history of science and information.

Historical Figures Lead Us to the Topic of Entanglement

Einstein Exhibit

We regard quantum mechanics as a complete theory for which the fundamental physical and mathematical hypotheses are no longer susceptible of modification.

--Heisenberg and Max Born, paper delivered to Solvay Congress of 1927

You know I have watched the long drawn out conversation on Backreaction about what was once already debated, to have advanced to current status in the world represented as a logic orientated process with regard to entanglement.

What are it's current status in terms of its expression experimentally to know what it is we are doing with something that had been debated long ago?



Solvay Physics Conference 1927 02:55 - 2 years ago

The most known people who participated in the conference were Ervin Schrodinger, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Auguste Piccard, Paul Dirac, Max Born, Wolfgang Pauli, Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein and others. The film opens with quick shots of Erwin Schrodinger and Niels Bohr. Auguste Piccard of the University of Brussels follows and then the camera re-focuses on Schrodinger and Bohr. Schrodinger who developed wave mechanics never agreed with Bohr on quantum mechanics. Solvay gave Heisenberg an opportunity to discuss his new uncertainty principle theory. Max Born's statistical interpretation of the wave function ended determinism in atomic world. These men - Bohr, Heisenberg, Kramers, Dirac and Born together with Born represent the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. Louis de Broglie wrote his dissertation on the wave nature of matter which Schrodinger used as basis for wave mechanics. Albert Einstein whose famous response to Born's statistical interpretation of wave function was "God does not play dice." Twenty-nine physicists, the main quantum theorists of the day, came together to discuss the topic "Electrons and Photons". Seventeen of the 29 attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners. Following is a "home movie" shot by Irving Langmuir, (the 1932 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry). It captures 2 minutes of an intermission in the proceedings. Twenty-one of the 29 attendees are on the film. --- It's Never too Late to Study: http://www.freesciencelectures.com/ --- Notice: This video is copyright by its respectful owners. The website address on the video does not mean anything. ---

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The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument in Quantum Theory

First published Mon May 10, 2004; substantive revision Wed Aug 5, 2009

In the May 15, 1935 issue of Physical Review Albert Einstein co-authored a paper with his two postdoctoral research associates at the Institute for Advanced Study, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. The article was entitled “Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” (Einstein et al. 1935). Generally referred to as “EPR”, this paper quickly became a centerpiece in the debate over the interpretation of the quantum theory, a debate that continues today. The paper features a striking case where two quantum systems interact in such a way as to link both their spatial coordinates in a certain direction and also their linear momenta (in the same direction). As a result of this “entanglement”, determining either position or momentum for one system would fix (respectively) the position or the momentum of the other. EPR use this case to argue that one cannot maintain both an intuitive condition of local action and the completeness of the quantum description by means of the wave function. This entry describes the argument of that 1935 paper, considers several different versions and reactions, and explores the ongoing significance of the issues they raise.

Might I confuse you then to see that their is nothing mystical about what our emotive states implore, that we might not also consider the purpose of Venn Logic, or, a correlation to Fuzzy logic to prepare the way for how we can become emotive entangled in our psychology, are ways "biologically mixed with our multilevel perspective" about how photons interact, to see that such a color of debate could have amounted to a distinction that arises from within. Which can manifest itself on a real world stage that is psychological forced out of the confines of human emotion, to be presented as a real world force "bridle or unbridled" with regard to the human condition?

See :

Entanglement Interpretation of Black Hole Entropy 

See Also:Backreaction: Testing the foundations of quantum mechanics

The Colour of Gravity

I am not sure how this post is to unfold, yet in my mind different exercises were unfolding as to how I should explain it. Can I come from an artist's perspective I wondered? Say "by chance" anything that seems relevant here in writing, and any relation to science "is" metaphorical by nature?

Yellow, Red, Blue
1925; Oil on canvas, 127x200cm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

These free, wild raptures are not the only form abstraction can take, and in his later, sadder years, Kandinsky became much more severely constrained, all trace of his original inspiration lost in magnificent patternings. Accent in Pink (1926; 101 x 81 cm (39 1/2 x 31 3/4 in)) exists solely as an object in its own right: the ``pink'' and the ``accent'' are purely visual. The only meaning to be found lies in what the experience of the pictures provides, and that demands prolonged contemplation. What some find hard about abstract art is the very demanding, time-consuming labour that is implicitly required. Yet if we do not look long and with an open heart, we shall see nothing but superior wallpaper.

I underlined for emphasis.

Does one want to gleam only what is coming across in geometrical form as a painting without understanding the depth of the artist in expression? Some may say, why any association at all, and just leave science to what it knows best without implicating any theoretical positions with the thought pertaining to gravity here.

Yes that's why I selected the title of this post as thus, and why I am going to give perspective to what I may, "as artist in writing" see with these words, and then you decide whether it is useful to you.

The Field as the Plane

An ancient thought penetrated my thinking as I thought of "the field" that a society can work in agriculture, and yet, by definition it was the plane, "length and width" that was also appealing here. I did not want to loose it's "origination" while I moved any thinking to the "abstract of brane" and the like, without firmly attaching it to the ground.

But who was to know that this plane could be moved to any "fifth dimensional understanding" without having studied the relationship to dimensional thinking and the like. The physics elevated.

I allow this one time escapism to "other thinking" to demonstrate what use the colour of gravity implies while at the same time "theoretical positions" talk about it's place in the universe. If one did not accept the moves in science and the way it expressed itself to allow geometrical inclination, then how the heck could non-euclidean thinking ever make it's way into how we will discuss "the fields" about us?

It meant that a perspective "on height" be adopted? As an observer I was watching from a position. While in that sleeping/dosing state, I wondered how else to express myself as these concepts were amalgamating themselves into a "conceptual frame of reference?"

The picture of the field(I am referring to the ancient interpretation) continued in my mind, and "by abstract" I thought to introduce a line extend from the centre of this field upward. So here I am looking at this field before me. Now I had wondered off previous by bring "the brane" in here, yet is not without that sight I thought how the heck could any idealization so ancient make sense to what the colour of gravity to mean.

Title page of Opticks .... by Sir Isaac Newton, 1642-1727. Fourth edition corrected by the author's own hand, and left before his death with the bookseller. Published in 1730. Library call number QC353 .N48 1730.

So "an idea" came to mind.

While correlating Newton's work here and the "extra dimensional thinking," I also wanted to include the work of the "Alchemist Newton". "To expand" the current thinking of our "emotive states" as a "vital expression of the biological being."

Draw into any further discussion of the "philosophical or other wise," these views of mine which are a necessary part of what was only held to a "religious and uneducated evolutionary aspect of the human being."

A cosmologist may still say that such thoughts of Einstein used in this vain is wrong, but I could never tear myself away from the views of "durations of time."

Colour Space and Colour Theory

The CIE 1931 colour space chromaticity diagram with wavelengths in nanometers. Note that the colors depicted depend on the color space of the device on which you are viewing the image.

So by having defined the "frame of reference," and by introducing "Colour of gravity" I thought it important and consistent with the science to reveal how dynamical any point within that reference can become expressive. The history in association also important.

In the arts and of painting, graphic design, and photography, color theory is a body of practical guidance to color mixing and the visual impact of specific color combinations. Although color theory principles first appear in the writings of Alberti (c.1435) and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (c.1490), a tradition of "colory theory" begins in the 18th century, initially within a partisan controversy around Isaac Newton's theory of color (Opticks, 1704) and the nature of so-called primary colors. From there it developed as an independent artistic tradition with only sporadic or superficial reference to colorimetry and vision science.

So you tend to draw on your reserves for such comparatives while thinking about this. I knew to apply "chemical relations" to this idea, and the consequential evidenced, by the resulting shadings by adding. I wanted to show "this point" moving within this colour space and all the time it's shading was describing the "nature of the gravity."

Adding a certain mapping function between the color model and a certain reference color space results in a definite "footprint" within the reference color space

By adding that vertical line in the field, the perimeter of my field of vision had to some how be drawn to an apex, while all kinds of thoughts about symmetry and perfection arose in my pyramidal mind.

All these colours, infinite in their ability to express the human emotive state, as a consequence of philosophical and expressed as function of the emotive being?

CIE 1976 L*, a*, b* Color Space (CIELAB)

CIE L*a*b* (CIELAB) is the most complete color model used conventionally to describe all the colors visible to the human eye. It was developed for this specific purpose by the International Commission on Illumination (Commission Internationale d'Eclairage, hence its CIE initialism). The * after L, a and b are part of the full name, since they represent L*, a* and b*, derived from L, a and b. CIELAB is an Adams Chromatic Value Space.

The three parameters in the model represent the lightness of the color (L*, L*=0 yields black and L*=100 indicates white), its position between magenta and green (a*, negative values indicate green while positive values indicate magenta) and its position between yellow and blue (b*, negative values indicate blue and positive values indicate yellow).

The Lab color model has been created to serve as a device independent model to be used as a reference. Therefore it is crucial to realize that the visual representations of the full gamut of colors in this model are never accurate. They are there just to help in understanding the concept, but they are inherently inaccurate.

Since the Lab model is a three dimensional model, it can only be represented properly in a three dimensional space.

Entanglement

the quantum entanglement would become so spread out through these interactions with the environment that it would become virtually impossible to detect. For all intents and purposes, the original entanglement between photons would have been erased.

Never the less it is truly amazing that these connections do exist, and that carefully arranged laboratory conditions they can be observed over significant distances. They show us, fundamentally, that space is not what we once thought it was. What about time? Page 123, The Fabric of the Cosmo, by Brian Greene

So many factors to include here, yet it is with the "idea of science" that I am compelled to see how things can get all mixed up, while I say emotive state, or Colours of gravity?

It gets a little complicated for me here, yet the "Fuzzy logic" introduced or "John Venn's logic" is not without some association here. Or, the psychology I had adopted as I learnt to read of models and methods in psychology that could reveal the thinking we have developed, and what it included.

Least I forget the "real entanglement" issues here, I have painted one more aspect with the "Colour of Gravity" to be included in this dimensional perspective, as we look to the models in science as well?

Working from basic principles and the history of spooky has made this subject tenable in today's world. A scientist may not like all the comparisons I have made based on it, I could never see how the emotive and mental statements of the expressive human being could not have been included in the making of the reality.

That I may of thought the "perfection of the human being" as some quality of the God in us all, would have granted sanction to some developing view of "religious virtuosity," against the goals of the scientist. So as ancient the views painted, there was something that may have been missed of the "Sensorium," and goes toward the basis of the philosophy shared currently by Lee Smolin.

This entanglement to me is a vital addition to our exploration of the universe. Our place and observation within it? It did not mean to discount our inclusion within it, within a larger "oscillatory perspective."

Ideas on Quantum Interrogation

We have chosen here to prepare a triplet of entangled particles of the GHZ type. The entanglement has been demonstrated by experiments performed in two orthogonal basis. The procedure can, in principle, operate on larger numbers of particles, opening the way to new fundamental tests of quantum theory.

So I am deep in thought, and the images of the neuron's capabilties, have me picturing the possibilties that could have been produced in the synapse. That the quantum computer would have said that it is directlty and photonically, linked to a wide range of possibilities in the developing ideas of the cosmo?

Okay, if that is too much, then think of Trackbacks, pictures with direct links, or paragraphs, directly linked to sites. This is what we want to create as a versatile function on the internet? Whie images are sparked in mind, where did they arise from, or some profound thought held in perspective of the Rainbow by Feynman, about what is beautiful about the work these physicists like to do. Their motivations spectrumly enhanced, about what it is about the nature of reality?



But it is more then this I think. Imagine using a feather to rotate a sphere, and the effect of the superfluid, to produce these strange anomalies of perception on superfluids. Okay, I am loosing myself here.

Do we selectively ignore other models from artificial intelligence such as Zadeh's Fuzzy Logic? This is a logic used to model perception and used in newly designed "smart" cameras. Where standard logic must give a true or false value to every proposition, fuzzy logic assigns a certainty value between zero and one to each of the propositions, so that we say a statement is .7 true and .3 false. Is this theory selectively ignored to support our theories?

Part of the struggle for me is, how we see, ingoing and out going states, and the possibilities that may arise? How in computation ideology, might raise it's head, as a third choice.

Now I am not certain here, and I open myself up to speculation, because I would like to see how such states, like those leading to "microstate blackholes" which would see the dissipation, resulted in the ability of all those particles to be mapped. In such a way, that the "onion skin or glast," interacts calorimetrized, colliderized, and with, cosmological high energy particles have by it's very act said, the result is, that the early universe, is this way, and the interacting measure, is the result of today? What is this product then?

It might have amounted to a "variation" of the cosmological constant? :)

On the other hand you need to be aware of the maybe most bizarre aspect of quantum mechanics: the fact that our world is only apparently tridimensional, in reality it is formed from two tridimensional worlds that we see superimposed onto each other: everywhere we think we see one point in fact there are two points. An elementary particle (such as an electron) when it rotates around its axis is passes from one part of the world into the other part, as if it would climb on a spiral; when it rotates furthermore it goes back as if the spiral would descend back into the first part of world.

See:

Entanglement and the New Physics

IN Viscosity State Production is ?

Venn Logic and TA

I always lke to inject a piece of my young child's perspective, becuase it helps explain things a bit about "the neighborshood." As we move through them. He asked me about the neighborhood that we were moving too, as if, that was the world. That was his question. "Is this the World," Dad? He was about 4 years old at the time. He's gone now, married, and leadng a very productive life.



The purpose of this picture above comes later down the length of this post. We are all not perfect, are we?

As a youth my first reading of this topic was from a book called, I'm Okay Your Okay, by M.D. Thomas A. Harris.

It helped in defining aspects of myself in context of what was happening in my environment, while being introspective. Is this always a good thing that we take stock of what is going on inside ourselves to wonder indeed what is all these parts of ourselves. How do we look at them in context of the way the "I" is being used.

These lessons were also derived from other places, so it becomes culminative in how one might look at society, and from it, a biased view forms no dfferent then one who has been transplanted from historical context of experience, moving from the lands of the Carribean to the UK society, held in context and views of the community in which they had lived, and live now. There were comparative features drawn from expeirence to consider here?

So as you move, you grow in perspective, all the while the pictures of mountains and similarities strike poises in our mind of of wnating recognition. Who was this person at the time of youth, who, like myself saw farms of a early history, to know that today this historical past is all but forgotten in the real world struggle of lives held in context of these farms? The picture today, contains the picture of our youth.

Parent ego state

This is a set of feelings, thinking and behaviour that we have copied from our parents and significant others.

As we grow up we take in ideas, beliefs, feelings and behaviours from our parents and caretakers. If we live in an extended family then there are more people to learn and take in from. When we do this, it is called introjecting and it is just as if we take in the whole of the care giver. For example, we may notice that we are saying things just as our father, mother, grandmother may have done, even though, consciously, we don't want to. We do this as we have lived with this person so long that we automatically reproduce certain things that were said to us, or treat others as we might have been treated.

As we grow up we take in ideas, beliefs, feelings and behaviours from our parents and caretakers. If we live in an extended family then there are more people to learn and take in from. When we do this, it is called introjecting and it is just as if we take in the whole of the care giver. For example, we may notice that we are saying things just as our father, mother, grandmother may have done, even though, consciously, we don't want to. We do this as we have lived with this person so long that we automatically reproduce certain things that were said to us, or treat others as we might have been treated.

Adult ego state

The Adult ego state is about direct responses to the here and now. We deal with things that are going on today in ways that are not unhealthily influenced by our past.

The Adult ego state is about being spontaneous and aware with the capacity for intimacy. When in our Adult we are able to see people as they are, rather than what we project onto them. We ask for information rather than stay scared and rather than make assumptions. Taking the best from the past and using it appropriately in the present is an integration of the positive aspects of both our Parent and Child ego states. So this can be called the Integrating Adult. Integrating means that we are constantly updating ourselves through our every day experiences and using this to inform us.

In this structural model, the Integrating Adult ego state circle is placed in the middle to show how it needs to orchestrate between the Parent and the Child ego states. For example, the internal Parent ego state may beat up on the internal Child, saying "You are no good, look at what you did wrong again, you are useless". The Child may then respond with "I am no good, look how useless I am, I never get anything right". Many people hardly hear this kind of internal dialogue as it goes on so much they might just believe life is this way. An effective Integrating Adult ego state can intervene between the Parent and Child ego states. This might be done by stating that this kind of parenting is not helpful and asking if it is prepared to learn another way. Alternatively, the Integrating Adult ego state can just stop any negative dialogue and decide to develop another positive Parent ego state perhaps taken in from other people they have met over the years.

Child ego state

The Child ego state is a set of behaviours, thoughts and feelings which are replayed from our own childhood.

Perhaps the boss calls us into his or her office, we may immediately get a churning in our stomach and wonder what we have done wrong. If this were explored we might remember the time the head teacher called us in to tell us off. Of course, not everything in the Child ego state is negative. We might go into someone's house and smell a lovely smell and remember our grandmother's house when we were little, and all the same warm feelings we had at six year's of age may come flooding back.

Both the Parent and Child ego states are constantly being updated. For example, we may meet someone who gives us the permission we needed as a child, and did not get, to be fun and joyous. We may well use that person in our imagination when we are stressed to counteract our old ways of thinking that we must work longer and longer hours to keep up with everything. We might ask ourselves "I wonder what X would say now". Then on hearing the new permissions to relax and take some time out, do just that and then return to the work renewed and ready for the challenge. Subsequently, rather than beating up on ourselves for what we did or did not do, what tends to happen is we automatically start to give ourselves new permissions and take care of ourselves.

Alternatively, we might have had a traumatic experience yesterday which goes into the Child ego state as an archaic memory that hampers our growth. Positive experiences will also go into the Child ego state as archaic memories. The positive experiences can then be drawn on to remind us that positive things do happen.

The process of analysing personality in terms of ego states is called structural analysis. It is important to remember that ego states do not have an existence of their own, they are concepts to enable understanding. Therefore it is important to say "I want some fun" rather than "My Child wants some fun". We may be in our Child ego state when we say this, but saying "I" reminds us to take responsibility for our actions.

Go ahead and Click on John Venn's picture

A painting of John Venn by Charles E. Brock. Photograph by Christopher Hurst, Hamilton-Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge

IN a strange world where such things are to become part of our analysis of subjective experience will we have created the perfect human being? Such models becme the logic structure of new computerized systems of thinking that will somehow recognize these factors in the human beings that we are, to have it done better in a traditional methods of logic, formed around and in computerized thinking.

Science and TA by Chris Boyd

Do we selectively ignore other models from artificial intelligence such as Zadeh's Fuzzy Logic? This is a logic used to model perception and used in newly designed "smart" cameras. Where standard logic must give a true or false value to every proposition, fuzzy logic assigns a certainty value between zero and one to each of the propositions, so that we say a statement is .7 true and .3 false. Is this theory selectively ignored to support our theories?

I had engaged this kind of exercise on my own, as I moved through different research avenues trying to piece together in my own mind, a process held in context of these neighborhoods, and such. How such interactive phases might have been thought about in science procedures. Looking at the basis of this logic, I was looking to find comparsions for this thinking in which the foundational perspectives might make sense.

Science and TA by Chris Boyd

If deduction is another way of knowing in TA, where and when is it applicable? Berne did use Venn diagrams, circles either distinct or overlapping, which were borrowed directly from symbolic logic to visually describe transactions. Perhaps TA in part can be considered a theory that analyzes ones own deductions based on childhood primitive assumptions. Perhaps it focuses on how people become irrational in decision making. In this case, TA provides critical thinking skills for human relations and can be considered a basis for analyzing the accuracy of our reality testing. Much as mathematics provides the language for science, TA may provide the logic for human relations and can be at least in part a deductive language.

Now as usual I did not have many to direct my thinking as I was developing thought processes, that the statements I highlighted were recognized as features I myself found along the journey to make sense of characteristic features we have of our thinking minds.

As you see clicking on John Venn's picture I would like to draw science into how I am seeing to support this "model of thinking." For clear and consise methods incorporating that clear mind.

Do we have to be robots with parts of ourselves missing from the supposed framework of that perfect being? This is what makes us unique in our perspectives as we move forward and share our point of views. We would have had to have been you to become who you are today. So it is never easy to see and be all that you want everyone to be.