One last bit of rambling in addition to my last post: When I assert that almost everything important gets discarded while merely distilling an array of rod and cone firings into a symbol for "chair", it's fair to ask exactly what that "other stuff" is. Alas, I believe it is fundamentally impossible to tell you! I have seen some people attempt to communicate it, perhaps with a phrase like "the play of shadow on the angle of the chair arm whose texture reminds me of the bus seat on that day with Julie in Madrid and the scratch on the leg which might be wood or might be plastic, sort of cone-like taking part of the chair's weight..." The problem with trying to evoke the complexity and associative nature of the perceptual experience with a phrase like that is that every symbolist can easily nod and think about how all that gets encoded in their symbolic representation, with its nodes for bus and leg and the encoded memory of past events. But actually, the "stuff" is not at the right level for communicating linguistically so the above type of description is a made-up sham, more misleading than revealing. To the extent I have a theory about all this stuff, it's this: animals, including our evolutionary forebears, have concepts much like we do. However, somewhere recently in our history, something happened that greatly magnified our ability to use language, reason logically, and form dizzyingly abstract concepts. I think it's likely that it was a single thing (or that these are aspects of the single thing) rather than postulating three different radical innovations occurring at once. I'm not sure what that thing was, but I'd guess the following analogy: Concepts formed in some part of the brain grew "handles" of some kind, which allows them to be manipulated in a flexible combinational way by some new or improved dynamic processing mechanism that is either unique to us or is maybe vastly expanded from the abilities of "lower" species. Symbolists see the handles and the way they get tugged around and abstract it into combinatorial logics and linguistic grammars, but it doesn't do any good to tug handles around unless they are attached to the huge gooey blobs of mind-stuff, which are NOT logical or linguistic in nature. I'm philosophically a "bottom upper" because I think the hard and interesting questions have to do with the nature of those gooey blobby concepts. Examples of people who are trying to deal with that issue are Hawkins with his Hierarchical Temporal Memory, and Josh with his Interpolating Associative Memory (though those models are quite different in detail). I don't have a model myself. I do like to follow you "top downers" though as you do amazing things!
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