tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post7985123938956828295..comments2024-03-09T09:06:35.288+00:00Comments on Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists: Is Indirect Perception Plausible?Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-84664426965430893222022-12-14T04:27:58.413+00:002022-12-14T04:27:58.413+00:00Do dreams can be classified as the indirect percep...Do dreams can be classified as the indirect perception of our reality?Thomashttps://swapnduniya.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-15948645246930909842021-11-22T23:50:55.623+00:002021-11-22T23:50:55.623+00:00I agree, I don't think you can tell a plausibl...I agree, I don't think you can tell a plausible story about perception mediated by computational symbolic representation. But I think you make your life too easy by limiting representation to a "computational, information processing system".<br /><br />There are theories of mental representation that make that assumption. Lakoff's Idealized Cognitive Models are constructs I find incredibly useful but Goffman's frames/footing could also be used. Arguably, people feel like the only way to make them make sense of this in the moment of use is computational or try to postulate some sort of neural correlate that does the same thing. But that's not necessary for the theory of mental representation itself.<br /><br />Surely, lots of perception tasks involve some kind of representation. It may not be processed in any sense computationally (and I don't think it is). But it only makes sense if some representation exists. Just try to describe the process of writing the blog post (full of perception tasks) without some notion of mental imagery.<br /><br />Or to think of a contrived perception task. You have baseball pitcher who has to pick up balls from a bucket to pitch. All the balls have pictures of people but the pitcher can only throw the ones with a US president on them. Even though that's as close to a computational task of memory retrieval and pattern matching, I don't think that that's what's happening. But representation of some sort is at least adjacent to the task.<br /><br />You can make it more difficult by saying to the pitcher that they must put a spin on any odd numbered president. Completing this sort of task would require some external look up source for most people - almost perfectly computational. What is happening there? What sort of training would be required to achieve any level of fluency? Would this even be an achievable task for a batter?<br /><br />And I would argue that most direct perception is motivated by or at least adjacent to some sort of representation that is experienced by people who try to turn introspective attention to it as vaguely computational. Which is why indirect perception makes better intuitive sense to most people than direct perception. We can guess at the nature of those representations from the demands of the tasks. But that does not mean we have to postulate them as abstract symbols presented for computation. <br /><br />People with aphantasia are an interesting case. They literally cannot form a mental image of a face but they can still recognise people. So, the representations cannot rely on actual mental images. But we still act as if we had some - that's the only way we can make sense of them. <br /><br />The symbolic computational account is not plausible. But neither is denying that something like representations is somehow involved. What is the alternative ecological psychology has to offer here?Dominik Lukešhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03071876778771965740noreply@blogger.com