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> I hope I answered your question It was mostly rethorical, but thanks :) BTW I think the concrete proper nouns we use (like "Eve") are actually abstractions

by ajuc 2y ago

> I hope I answered your question It was mostly rethorical, but thanks :) BTW I think the concrete proper nouns we use (like "Eve") are actually abstractions too and prove some reasoning capability. At first infants don't realize objects exist. They just see shapes and react to them. When something disappears from their view - it's the same as if it stopped existing. That's why you can play peekaboo with them and not bore them. To abstract from "a shape that sometimes appears, moves and disappears" to "an object that exists over time even when it's not visible" is a pretty impressive generalization. If AI was able to do it on its own I would be impressed at least. I'd even say it's more impressive than the next step (generalizing from "mom' and "papa" to "person"). Of course we have hardware in our brains dedicated for this stuff and it's probably not conscious reasoning that gets us the object permanence. And we don't remember it in any case. So we take it for granted. But when you think about it the generalization from "sensations in my eyes" to "objects in the world" is a pretty big one.

gspencley 2y ago
It gets even wilder than that. There is a psychological concept called "anchoring" which associates two different things perceptually. For example, it's what happens when you listen to a song during a particular time in your life, and then many years later you hear the song and feel all the things you felt in that moment with all of the memories triggered etc. You make a good point about language itself being some form of abstraction in reference to the objective world. But this conversation reminds me of a famous artwork called "The Treachery of Images." It is a painting of a tobacco pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe" in English). Through the painting, we can appreciate that a picture of a pipe is an abstraction that represents a pipe, and is not the same thing as a pipe itself. It is a painting that appeals directly to reason. The philosophical and scientific question is: when a dog hears the word "walk", or sees a leash, is it conceptual abstraction at play; the understanding of a logical category... or is it emotional anchoring that came about through Pavlovian conditioning and having that word associated with a memory of a concrete?

by ajuc 2y ago

gspencley 2y ago

It gets even wilder than that. There is a psychological concept called "anchoring" which associates two different things perceptually. For example, it's what happens when you listen to a song during a particular time in your life, and then many years later you hear the song and feel all the things you felt in that moment with all of the memories triggered etc. You make a good point about language itself being some form of abstraction in reference to the objective world. But this conversation reminds me of a famous artwork called "The Treachery of Images." It is a painting of a tobacco pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe" in English). Through the painting, we can appreciate that a picture of a pipe is an abstraction that represents a pipe, and is not the same thing as a pipe itself. It is a painting that appeals directly to reason. The philosophical and scientific question is: when a dog hears the word "walk", or sees a leash, is it conceptual abstraction at play; the understanding of a logical category... or is it emotional anchoring that came about through Pavlovian conditioning and having that word associated with a memory of a concrete?