Lightning rods up and grounded. Contact!
(disclaimer, sort of: - the following all derives from long wanderings through the woods of neurobiology while on a Faustian crusade to understand how one can make machines think.....)
It's all in the whizzer. That's right. The Whizzer. Never overlook the obvious.
From the earliest moments of animate existence, the body trains the mind. In the course of doing what they are evolved to do, limbs, muscles, surfaces and appendages communicate with the central nervous system in evolving multi-path feedback loops to develop the dialogues of control and command that allow for coordinated movement and, ultimately, ballet.
One of the first self-actualizing experiences of a newborn baby boy is writing his name in the general direction of the sky (ergo ad astra, per asperem?) with his gender-specific nozzle. His twin sister receives less validation for the same performance, for lack of equivalent flow dynamics. And so thus, if not earlier in the womb, they launch on divergent tracks in regard to further training their nascent conceptual faculties in greater and lesser degrees of spatial awareness.
By the age of four or 5, the little boys are busy decorating snowbanks, throwing spears and rocks, shooting arrows, slingshots, and imaginary cannons. They are climbing up and down and falling off things at an enourmous rate, developing the intuitive complex senses of spatial geometry, gravity, and physical cause and effect. At the same age the girls are more commonly pushed (by their mommies) into staying clean, playing with dolls, arranging things into neat and orderly sets and piles and groups of things, and doing rhythmic, repetitive, extrinsically bounded activities such as dance and 'play' acting.
The inherent physical proclivities toward divergence in spatial and physical cause-effect reasoning are accelerated by nurturing methods from the preceeding generation of females who raise - one might note - both genders, but who undoubtedly have more hope for the girls and more resignation that "boys will be boys". As the physio-intellectual seeds planted in early life grow into adulthood, the patterns thus embedded become increasingly difficult - but never impossible - to modify.
So, in the biological universe, the hardware determines how the software 'needs' to work. Habits follow, and personalities color in to make it all seem somehow consistent.
-o-
One can expect that Seriph's broad understanding of this topic comes from intense contemplation of his own......experience.
Last edited by arcniz; 12th Sep 2002 at 19:05.