Why Epistemic Games are like a Fish

Research just published in the PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, Chang Liu, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (summary here) looks at how fish locate objects in the water using a special line of sensors along their side–and uses that research to build an “artificial lateral line” for underwater sensing. The natural lateral line has more sensors, but the principle of detecting objects by the disturbances they make in the water is the same.

The idea has obvious use in submarines and other underwater applications. But what makes it interesting to me is the process itself: looking to an already existing model–particularly one that evolved over time–for a solution to a problem.

Cultural selection, like natural selection, ruthlessly eliminates some ideas and keeps others. The ones that survive solve some particular problem, so if we can expand the reach of existing cultural forms, we may be able to solve new problems without working from scratch.

In a very important sense, that’s what epistemic games do: they look at existing learning environments where people develop important ways of thinking and copy them, Like Dr. Liu’s artificial neural line, an epistemic game is a simplification of its natural (in this case, cultural) model.

But the value of drawing on an exiting solution to a complex problem is similar.

Epistemic games really are like a fish–or like a simulated fish, in any case.