Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk!lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk!pipex!pipex!peernews.demon.co.uk!chatham.demon.co.uk!ohgs
Subject: Re: When is a simulation of a Y a Y? (Was Bag the Turing
References: <790268100snz@chatham.demon.co.uk> <1995Jan16.183101.14121@il.us.swissbank.com>
Organization: Royal Institute of International Affairs
Reply-To: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
X-Newsreader: Demon Internet Simple News v1.27
Lines: 54
X-Posting-Host: chatham.demon.co.uk
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 1995 08:49:19 +0000
Message-ID: <790850959snz@chatham.demon.co.uk>
Sender: usenet@demon.co.uk

Two points: in respect of peripheral vision and about respresentations and
their "reality".

Peripheral flickerings:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  There was a burst of enthusaiasm in the mid-Seventies for gadgets which 
  watched your fixation point and pupilliary dilation as you viewed a scene. 
  The former showed your hierarchy of evaluation and the latter (coupled to 
  dwell time) your interest. The idea was that here was an objective way of 
  telling how well a consumer took in a display, how appropriately a pilot 
  evaluated an instrument panel, how diligently the gaze of an employee at a 
  secure installation lingered upon the buttocks of his fellow workers. (Not a 
  bit politically correct, but widely used, I gather.)

  My point is that if one flashes up a completely novel picture, the eye does 
  indeed scoot about it, dithering on buttocks and mattocks, honey and money; 
  but it does so in a manner which shows that something other than the fovea 
  has summed up what is there, assigned meaning to the components and directed 
  the gaze at the meaningful bits. This occurs very rapidly: the fovea is 
  tracking in 10 mSec of the screen lighting up; suggesting that many and 
  parallel buttock detectors are being deployed on the scene. This also means 
  that these are one sort of visual primitive: high order, to be sure, and well 
  up from the edge, colour patch and contrast detectors into which we can 
  insert sensors in the visual cortex.

Real actors: oxymoron or paradigm? 
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  High order systems are abstract critters. They do not suffer reduction to 
  their component parts, as they are more complex than those components. A 
  buttock detector can be noted in that it changes the direction in which the 
  eye is pointed ("There seems to be a Force at work, Jim"). The framework 
  which allows one to encompass and understand - model - that Force does, 
  however, require one to use the concept of the buttock. One needs 
  understand the high order abstracting  system in its own terms of reference 
  before one can understand it; and what it *does* in the system in which it is 
  embedded is similarly something distinct from how one might understand the 
  properties of the rest of the system.

  All very self-referential; abstract and - like the actor in a theatre - real 
  only withion the terms of reference in which it is operating. Like the 
  theatre, however, the actor is part of these terms of reference: no Hamlet 
  without the Prince of Denmark. We live in this theatre: a partial construct, 
  but solid enough to you and I, the audience of one. The actor is as real as 
  the material which is presented through the actor; and is transformed by 
  acquired arts of presentation, filtration, synthesis which are as much a part 
  of what we see as the sensoria on which the presentation is based. "Red" and 
  "square" and "up" are as real as my perception of this (too damn' small) 
  keyboard is real. They act, they operate, they *are*. To say thatthey are not 
  is to split a hair, not to pursue one.

_________________________________________________

  Oliver Sparrow
  ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
