1: The natural abstraction thesis that a substantial part of what makes “good objects” don’t depend on the beholder (or at least a large class of beholders will agree on a large class of “good object”)
2: If something feels like a relatively basic part of my perception, then it hints at fundamental evolved algorithms, that are then likely to point at “good objects”. As an example, your eye cells have built in edge detectors that work a lot like the image processing algorithms humanity invented. I expect many nonhuman animals’s brains to categorize animals and edges similarly (e.g. there are center surround retinal ganglion cells in mice).
A central (get it?) example for me is a math thing: the definition of the boundary/interior/exterior of a topological set. I have some intuitions, built from my life of interacting with the world and from evolution, about what “boundary” should mean. Given some prompting about open sets, I was able to basically come up with the ‘official’ definition. I suspect that if/when alien civilizations exist, that they’ll have a very similar concept.
3: I agree there’s an important sense in which the genome matters. But for example: imagine a world where (non-human) animals were symbiotes, that only join/separate rarely, usually out of sight, and that have complicated genetic inheritance patterns; but otherwise usually looked and acted like our world’s animals.
I predict that in that world, humans and other animals would partition life into objects in a very similar way. Later, humans would realize the symbiote thing, and would perhaps add words for it; but it would have to be something kids were taught by their parents, or only learned when they were helping around the farm at 10 years old.
Well, I was taking for granted:
1: The natural abstraction thesis that a substantial part of what makes “good objects” don’t depend on the beholder (or at least a large class of beholders will agree on a large class of “good object”)
2: If something feels like a relatively basic part of my perception, then it hints at fundamental evolved algorithms, that are then likely to point at “good objects”. As an example, your eye cells have built in edge detectors that work a lot like the image processing algorithms humanity invented. I expect many nonhuman animals’s brains to categorize animals and edges similarly (e.g. there are center surround retinal ganglion cells in mice).
A central (get it?) example for me is a math thing: the definition of the boundary/interior/exterior of a topological set. I have some intuitions, built from my life of interacting with the world and from evolution, about what “boundary” should mean. Given some prompting about open sets, I was able to basically come up with the ‘official’ definition. I suspect that if/when alien civilizations exist, that they’ll have a very similar concept.
3: I agree there’s an important sense in which the genome matters. But for example: imagine a world where (non-human) animals were symbiotes, that only join/separate rarely, usually out of sight, and that have complicated genetic inheritance patterns; but otherwise usually looked and acted like our world’s animals.
I predict that in that world, humans and other animals would partition life into objects in a very similar way. Later, humans would realize the symbiote thing, and would perhaps add words for it; but it would have to be something kids were taught by their parents, or only learned when they were helping around the farm at 10 years old.