DilGreen comments on Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 February 2008 11:59PM

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Comment author: DilGreen 11 October 2010 02:05:50PM *  6 points [-]

Infants do not possess many inborn categories, if they have any at all. They perceive the world as directly as their senses permit. But they do not remain this way for long.

This seems to be objectively untrue. Many ingenious experiments with very young children forcefully suggest a wide range of inborn categories, including faces,. There is even evidence that male and female children pay different attention to different categories long before they can talk.

Further, there is strong evidence that children have inborn expectations of relationships between sensory input. The physics of the eye ensures that images focussed on the retina are upside-down, and experiment shows that, for a few days, this is how the world is perceived. But babies learn to invert the image, so that it tallies with reality. This happens automatically, and within days - presumably through some hard-wired expectation of the interrelation between senses - eg proprioception and sight.