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Article 4492 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: fb0m+@andrew.cmu.edu (Franklin Boyle)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Definition of Understanding
Message-ID: <UdlDr6O00WBNA4jU80@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 16 Mar 92 19:57:58 GMT
Organization: Cntr for Design of Educational Computing, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 19

Daryl McCullough writes:

>I believe that the common way of describing seeing in terms of
>"receiving a mental image" is misleading, if not plain wrong. What
>good what it do you if your brain created an image of what you were
>seeing inside your head? You would need to have something like "mental
>eyes" to scan *that* image to know what you were looking at.
> 
>The end product of seeing is *not* an image--seeing *starts* with an
>image--it is information.

Sure, there are no little photographs.  But consider the informational
aspects of the input image; What about the image enables us to have
information about it?  You're thinking in terms of the physical
process of pattern matching when you say, "You would need to have
something like 'mental eyes' to scan *that* image to know what you
were looking at."

-Frank


