What is Learning?
Seems like a simple question, right? Until you actually try to answer it. I mean, kids do it all day everyday in schools around the world — so we think. Is it actually happening the way we think or at all?
That all depends on what we mean by “learning”. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as such:
“the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught”
Ok. Maybe it isn’t that hard of a question. Or is it? What if we unpack those words like acquisition, knowledge, skills, experience, study, taught (or teaching). Do any of them really explain the phenomenon of what we call learning?
Let’s back up. Let’s explore.
What if learning, in its most primitive, granular form, is merely an organism’s ability to recognize how interactions with stimuli in the external environment change either itself or the external environment? This is not reductive thinking. It is more than just stimuli and response, because the organism is also recognizing when it is the stimuli and the response comes from the environment and how external stimuli can affect the external environment. It also entails that there may be more complex chains of stimuli and response events. Not just one stimulus and one response, but chains of them that link and interact together. Additionally, the stimuli could be internal to the organism and require the organism to respond to its own internal processes. This recognition then becomes something the organism can predict. Maybe it takes several occurrences of an event or chain of events for the predictability to get established. The more complex the chain of stimuli, the more careful the organism must be in order to observe all that happened, what led to what, and so on.
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I don't know. This is just a hypothesis.
If that were all true, what might that mean?
Does that all imply that learning would be context-dependent? The context being the stimuli (internal or external) or set of stimuli, the environment, the response (whether from the organism itself, another organism, or the environment)?
And what determines what and if the organism learns from a particular context?
Could it be intuition? Maybe intuition fueled by curiosity and observation?
Would that mean that learning is intuitively context-based?
Is that living organisms’ innate way of interacting with our environment? Or what we call living? Is this the natural state of being? Curiosity that expresses itself as intuiting what a particular context can teach us? Is learning baked into the hardware? Is it the default mode?
Are there limitations to this natural learning mode? Could sensory capabilities and input expand or contract what is learnable for a certain organism? A migratory bird may not be able to learn to read English, and I may not be able to learn to magnetically point north. Different sensory capabilities enable different knowables. Or different skills.
Let’s compare this with ye old dictionary definition. The process explored above certainly covers the “acquiring” part. That is achieved through the intuition, interaction, the observation, the recognition. That covers the “through experience, study or being taught” part. What gets acquired is the “knowledge or skill” — the chain of events that becomes predictable or the ability to enact a chain of events that achieves a certain predictable outcome.
The definition and exploration seem compatible. The exploration seems a little wider, deeper, more nuanced. And, it just deals with learning on a granular level. What would it be like to learn more complex knowledge or skills? Like learning how the modern world came to be as it is? Or learning how to play the piano?
It could get infinitely complex.
And is there more that the dictionary leaves out?
Could there be different types of learning beyond just generic knowledge and skills? Which can be pretty vague terms?
How about these?
rote learning - memorizing facts, numbers, tales, rules, ideas, etc.
social learning - recognizing norms of inter and intra-species interaction.
physical skill learning - mastering bodily movements to achieve a goal (i.e. learning to dance the tango).
mental skill learning - mastering a set of mental processes to achieve a goal (i.e. learning to factor a quadratic equation).
naturalistic learning - synthesizing an observational understanding of environmental processes.
transformational learning - seeing the world and one’s role in it differently.
Maybe there are more.
But it is hard to conceive of any of the above types of learning without the intuitive context-based nature. Maybe the context provides potential incentives to learn or not learn? And intuition guides what the learner will or will not learn in a certain context?
I don’t know if any of this is knowable. But let’s keep exploring.
Would that mean that learning is extremely individualized based on how the learner intuitively approaches the world? Don’t we all intuit differently? Is that because we are innately unique in our perspectives and curiosities? Or do we learn to intuit things differently, per the processes discussed above. That seems like dualistic thinking a bit. Maybe it is both. Maybe it is both plus other unknowable factors that we cannot detect and therefore cannot even fathom.
This is getting complex! But that should not be surprising. Curiosity can teach us many things. And it can help us see the interconnection and interdependence that pervades reality. Curiosity is the bridge that connects us with our reality.
And we haven’t even discussed what occurs inside the brain of a learner! There are so many sides to learning.
Could mimicking the understanding of interconnection and interdependence be the way that learning causes neural pathways to wire and network in novel ways? To become more interconnected and interdependent? Brains mirroring reality? We do have mirror neurons, but as far as we know they are mostly used for social interaction. Maybe there is more that we have not been able to learn about what mirror neurons do. Maybe all our neurons are different kinds of mirror neurons that mirror different aspects of our reality. Could our neural networks be mirror maps of our reality? Is that a neurological understanding of learning?
What would all of this mean on a practical level? As in, if this is what learning is all about, how do we get people or even other organisms to learn things we want them to learn? It seems infinitely complex to near impossible. Especially, if we are thinking about making people learn in batches or groups based on some arbitrary similarity like approximate age?
Does that mean that a school system is completely incapable of enacting learning? Because the process of learning is so complex and individualized while also intuitively context-based that it is nearly impossible to cause a person to learn, much less a group of people to learn the same thing at the same space-time? And do two people who happen to share a moment in the same space-time experience the same context? Or is context also subjective?
Is it possible that there are types of learning that can occur in batch-oriented educational systems? Think of the ones discussed above. Maybe rote learning? Social learning? Physical or mental skill learning? Maybe?
Or, could all types of learning occur in these systematized settings, but we just can’t control how and when which types of learning occur? Could there also be a lag in learning? A person has an experience or interaction and then years later understands that event in a different way to either learn something novel or see the event differently?
If all that is true, it seems like systemic education is mainly a crap shoot. It is a social experiment. Because, at best, education is a matter of faith?