Обсуждение:Vygotsky as a person to think with about computer science and psychology

When a person learns, he himself is taking steps toward learning; but this is not because he knows that “learning is useful.” The baby does not know this, but it learns most easily and actively. In the baby, associations “simply form” without any reinforcement. This is the functioning of the mechanism for control of associating, which requires nourishment. If he does not have it the person becomes bored, a negative emotion. There is no need for the teacher to force anything on the child, or upon people in general: the teacher's job is simply to provide nourishment for the imagination. Upon receiving this nourishment a person feels satisfaction. Thus, he himself is always learning inside. This is an active, creative process. Thanks to the metasystem transition, the human being acquired his own internal teacher who is constantly teaching him, driving him with the internal stick and luring him with the internal carrot.

The “internal teacher” is not a fanatic; he takes a realistic approach to his pupil's capabilities. Representations which coincide or are close in time by no means always form stable associations. If they did, it would indicate the existence of absolute memory—that is, total recall. We do not know why we do not have this capability; it may be supposed that the brain's information capacity is simply inadequate. But the existence of people whose capabilities for memorization are substantially greater than average appears to contradict this hypothesis and leads us to conclude that the lack of such capability is more likely the result of some details involving the organization of control of associating. In any case, because there is no absolute memory there must be a criterion for selecting associations. One of the human criteria is the same as found among animals: emotional strain. We memorize things involving emotions first of all. But the human being also has another criterion (which is, by the way, evidence of the existence of control of associating): we can decide to memorize something and as a result in fact do memorize it. Finally, the third and most remarkable criterion is that of novelty. p. 74

The revolution was created by the appearance of human society which possessed a definite culture, above all language. The key aspect here is language. Language in general is understood to be a certain way of correlating objects Ri, which are considered to be some kind of primary reality, to objects Li which are called the names of objects Ri and are viewed as something secondary, especially created to be correlated to objects Ri . In relation to the name Li object Ri is called its meaning. The aggregate of all objects Li is frequently also called a language (in a more expanded form it would be better to call it the material fixer or carrier of the language). The set of objects Ri can be much broader and more varied than the set of language objects Li This is the case, for example, with natural languages such as Russian, English, and others. It is clear that an enormous amount of information is lost when word descriptions are substituted for the perception of real objects and situations. In those cases where the information levels of objects Ri and Li are on the same order of magnitude, the cybernetic term code is often used in place of the word “language.” The transition from R to L is called coding and the opposite transition from L to R is decoding. Thus, when a message is transmitted in 'Morse' Code by radio, the initial text—a set of letters—is coded in a set of dots and dashes. In this code (language), information travels through the air and is received at an assigned point, where decoding from the language of dots and dashes to the language of letters takes place. In this case the process of coding and decoding does not cause information loss. p.78

Society can be viewed as a single super-being. Its “body” is the body of all people plus the objects that have been and are being created by the people: clothing, dwellings, machines, books, and the like. Its “physiology” is the physiology of all people plus the culture of society—that is, a certain method of controlling the physical component of the social body and the way that people think. The emergence and development of human society marks the beginning of a new (the seventh in our count) stage in the evolution of life. The functional formula of the metasystem transition from the sixth stage to the seventh is: control of thinking = culture

TOOLS FOR PRODUCING TOOLS LET US RETURN to material culture and the stairway effect. The objects and implements of labor are parts, subsystems of the system we have called the “superbeing,” which emerges with the development of human society. Now we shall simply call this super-being culture, meaning by this both its physical “body” and its method of functioning (“physiology”), depending on the context. Therefore, the objects and implements of labor are subsystems of culture. They may possess their own complex structure and, depending upon how they are used, they may be part of larger subsystems of culture which also have their own internal structures. Specifically, the division of material subsystems into objects of labor and implements of labor (tools) is in itself profoundly meaningful and reflects the structure of production. When a human being applies tool B to objects of a certain class A, this tool, together with objects A, forms a metasystem, in relation to subsystems A. Indeed, subsystem B acts directly upon subsystems A and is specially created for this purpose. (Of course, this action does not take place without the participation of the human hand and mind, which are part of any production system.) Thus, the appearance of a tool for working on certain objects that had not previously been worked on is a metasystem transition within the production system. As we have seen, the ability to create tools is one of the first results of the development of human traits; and because the human being remains the permanent moving force of the production system, the metasystem transition from object of labor to implement of labor may be repeated as many times as one likes. After having created tool B to work on objects in class A the human being begins to think of ways to improve the tool and manufactures tool C to use in making tools of class B. He does not stop here; he makes tool D to improve tools of class C, and so on. The implement of labor invariably becomes an object of labor. This is the stairway effect. It is important to assimilate the very principle of making tools (learning to climb up a step). After this assimilation everything follows of its own accord: the production system becomes an ultrametasystem capable of development. The result of this process is modern industry, a highly complex multilevel system which uses natural materials and step by step converts them into its “body”—structures,

== As machines are increasingly used in science and production, the human being will become increasingly free from noncreative activity—which, no matter how paradoxical it may seem, becomes needed precisely because of the successes of creative activity! For what is creativity? Above all creativity is constructive action, action that leads to an increase in the level of organization in the world. But an action is not characterized as creative only on the basis of its results. These results must be considered within the relationship to the mechanism of the action or the relations between this action and the system that gave rise to it. The same action may be a creative act when it is done for the first time and mechanical repetition of the past when it is done according to established, known rules, by applying standard procedures. Nothing that is produced within the framework of an already existing system of control, whether it is work by a computer or the composition of stereotyped articles, is creativity. Creativity always goes beyond the framework of the system; it is free action. Creativity is a metasystem transition. The evolution of the universe is continuous creativity. One of the manifestations of this process is creative acts in culture which establish new levels of control and in this way deprive lower-level actions of their creative character. Thousands of slaves had to be driven to build a pyramid; thousands of arithmetic operations had to be performed to calculate the exact positions of the planets on paper. Machines will rid the human being of that sort of work and transfer human activity to that level of the hierarchy which is still creative at the given moment. With time, this level will also cease to be creative; the boundary between creative and uncreative work is steadily crawling upward.