Nate_Barna2 comments on Surface Analogies and Deep Causes - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 June 2008 07:51AM

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Comment author: Nate_Barna2 22 June 2008 02:28:11PM 0 points [-]

When did I start to distrust supposed knowledge from the perceptual to the conceptual? When I recognized that when I perceive a tree my head doesn't explode because it didn't duplicate it. Aha, if I'm to trust any knowledge, including provisional, I can trust abstractions. Indeed, that's what the tree is in my brain at a significant etiological terminus. If I'm to recognize other trees and to be able to talk about them, my perceptual apparatus had better be able to abstract relevant tree-properties from trees automatically. The principle: Perceptual 2-D maps are not intrinsically superior to conceptual n-D maps. Hanson makes this sort of point very clear.