RE: Fixed-Action-Patterns: The Heart And Soul of Survival Instincts
Is there a fixed action pattern for designing, say, analog electronics? I know of no fixed procedure to do that, except meta stuff surrounding the actual designing. Yet designing is human behaviour.
Can there even be an a-priori action pattern when you are thinking up something that hasn't been thought of before? The urge to think up new things, sure, some procedure surrounding it for planning and documentation, sure, but the ways we come up with new things differ as much, and often are as new as, the very things we come up with. So I think the very fuzzy process, if any, of designing/inventing new things could well be an exception.
Saying "designing" is an action pattern by itself doesn't refute this; you could black-box everything and call it an "action pattern" even when there is no pattern to be found, making your hypothesis unfalsifiable and therefore less than useful 8-).
I believe there is much like a puffer fish or a bird design a nest and look like elaborate designs that humans would have hard time replicating. We design electronic boards as a utility for enabling better living standards much like other species cater their nest to ensure a better livelihood (more suitable mate, offspring etc). If you like we just make a design within a design. There is a transference of the design from the raw copulation stage to the more modern that demands a tool . Also note how many of our designs replicate shapes in nature or concepts found in nature even if they are electronic.
it is possible but i think improbable due to the sheer number of people under globalisation being exposed on a daily basis to the same stimuli.
Note how I said "derivative". We can falsify the original fixed-action-patterns. not the derivatives.
Hm. I'm unconvinced 8-). I think designing/inventing requires unlearning of, and letting go of, action patterns rather than using them. The urge to invent may be an action pattern, the end result may look like an action pattern or design already found in nature, but I doubt action patterns play a role in the actual designing/inventing. I think things like General Relativity Theory, or even Phase Locked Loops, were thought up without following any action pattern, but rather by ignoring existing action patterns and letting something else take over, the undefinable creativity, where real intelligence, the ability to solve new problems without instruction, takes over from standard operating procedures the majority of humankind uses to get by.
Then again, ignoring action patterns to arrive at new thinking could be an action pattern by itself, which means you are still right, but I refuse to accept that, as it is no fun 8-).