Mowgli : Curiousity to imitate
The story ‘Jungle Book’ was inspired by a true incident. In the year 1872, people found a boy named Dina, who was raised by wolves. The hunters killed the pack and brought the boy home. He walked on all four legs and initially couldn’t walk on two feet. It’s a very interesting story. Does it tell us something about how human curiosity works, especially when it comes to learning complex skills? Current way of thinking about curiosity is that it is the agent’s inability to predict the consequences of their actions. However, I don’t think this definition will lead to discovery of skills which are meaningful for humans. In the following paragraph, I will try to present an alternative view.
The boy raised by wolves walked both hands and feet and couldn’t walk on 2 feet until he saw humans walking. The boy learned to walk on four feet, not because he had four feet, but because he saw and visually imitated the actions of those animals around him. This indicates that the existence of a higher level ‘skill’ of walking (on two feet) is hard to discover for the agent by itself, just by being curious about our actions and their effects on the environment. We observe those around us to learn about its existence and then get curious to extract important information about the skill. Once the skill is decided, we do take actions to satisfy our curiosity about the skill.