Re: Perceptual symbol systems

From: Traveler (traveler_at_nospam.com)
Date: 08/11/04 

Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 16:04:04 -0400

In article <8d8494cf.0408110934.7bfeeb18@posting.google.com>,
feedbackdroids@yahoo.com (dan michaels) wrote:

>Traveler <traveler@nospam.com> wrote in message news:<tf1jh09cfr6bevobdtokbu98lm2mc7v2lh@4ax.com>...
>> In article <8d8494cf.0408101814.3bc29230@posting.google.com>,
>> feedbackdroids@yahoo.com (dan michaels) wrote:
>>
>> >Traveler <traveler@nospam.com> wrote in message news:<i4jfh0tg5dqnm16ourmo8s7fol84chbneh@4ax.com>...
>> >
>> >
>> >> There is very little in the brain that is related to the world around
>> >> us when we are born.
>> >
>> >
>> >One wonders where did the 30+ visual areas in the cortex come from,
>> >and why are they interconnected via 1100+ pathways. Why are there edge
>> >detectors, movement detectors, color detectors, shape/blob detectors,
>> >orientation detectors, binocular disparity detectors, on and on?
>>
>> What makes you think any of it has to do with our particular
>> environment? Certainly it has to do with the design of the eye which
>> is based on the physics of light at certain wavelengths and the
>> refraction index of the lens. And it's true that the visual cortex is
>> genetically designed to recognize edges, lines directions, etc... But
>> all this stuff is just generic visual sensory capabilities. The eye
>> and the visual cortex have nothing to do with the actual things that
>> you look at. That is to say, they could not care less where you set
>> you gaze: animals, trees, people, stars, rivers, rocks or what have
>> you.
>
>
>Well, in fact, that is the point. There is a reason we have those
>particular 30+ cortical centers that each perform more or less
>specific types of processing on the incoming visual information.
>Natural selection selected for those particular processing types
>because the information they provided to the organism enhanced
>survival. The information selected for was common and repeatedly found
>in the environment the organisms evolved within. Trees have vertical
>edges, stones are blobs, other animals [predators/etc] move, all have
>colors, objects close in have larger parallax differences than those
>further away, on and on. The visual system organization didn't just
>happen, it happened for a reason. The reason they're coded into the
>genes is because they help the organism survive in the environment is
>evolved into. If they didn't intimately help survival in the real
>world, then the organisms would have gone extinct long ago.

Certainly. But this applies only to lower animals. Humans, OTOH, don't
have anything close to the degree of specialization that animals do.
As I wrote earlier, some animals can recognize specific objects that
they have never seen before. Our visual system will work just as well
on Mars as in a virtual world. We don't just recognize vertical edges
but all sorts of edges having various degrees of orientation. This is
the mark of general visual system.

>Many of these centers exist in other mammals, but apparently humans
>have more types. From an evolutionary perspective, these are all
>basically outgrowths and reuse of processing centers which exist in
>vertebrates lower than mammals, such as amphibians and reptiles; but
>as mammals evolved, the processing became less specific and more
>general, which allowed new species to appear. Supposedly objects that
>don't move are invisible to frogs - frog survival apparently isn't
>enhanced by being able to recognize a tree or a rock, although this
>idea does seem strange. Apparently frogs don't move fast enuf that
>they need to recognize a tree prior to running into it. Whatever.
>Animals that move fast need to be able to "predict future" - as
>Dennett says - so evolution gave them the necessary visual centers -
>ability to perceive binocular parallax, etc.

You will be surprised to learn that we are not that different than
frogs. Humans cannot see anything either if there is no motion in our
visual field. Our eyes are continually moving in tiny jumps called
saccades. It was found that the moment the eye is immobilized (via
medication and head restraint), we lose our ability to see stationary
objects. We become frogs, so to speak. A frog's eye does not seem to
have human-like saccadic capability. A frog sits there immobile and
practically blind waiting for something interesting (prey) to move.

An interesting observation in this context is that some spiders do
have eye saccades even though their eyes cannot turn. They make up for
it by having five eyes around their heads.

>It's for all of these reasons that I say our perceptual systems give
>us a "close-enough" internal representation of the outside world. We
>have to learn the names for objects, etc, and we have to learn as
>babies to distinquish object from background, and other
>characteristics of the physical world, but this would not be very
>effective if we didn't posses those 30+ visual centers provided by
>evolutionary processes.

My whole point is not there is no correlation between the environment
and brain connectivity (of course there is), but that, a learning
organism does not try to represent the environment in its brain. This
is true, even if, after post-mortem dissection or through whatever
other means, we do find a correlation between the environment and the
brain of the organism. You have to remember that the organism does not
see the environment separate from the "representation.". It can only
see the "representation" which is not a representation because the
subject (what is being represented) is not there. You must look at the
problem from the point of view of the intelligence itself, not from
your point of view. Representation is always from the observer's point
of view.

Louis Savain

Artificial Intelligence From the Bible:
http://users.adelphia.net/~lilavois/Seven/bible.html

Falsifiable Predictions:
http://users.adelphia.net/~lilavois/Seven/predictions.html

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