Like, I can draw a picture of a face in increasingly finer and finer detail down to “all the detail I see” but its still going to contain unifying assumptions—like a vector representation of a face, versus the data, which may be pixellated—made up of specific individual measurement events. Or I can show a chart of where and how all the nerves are excited in my eyes, which are the ‘raw data’ level stuff that I have access to about what’s ‘out there’, for which the simplest explanation is most probably a face. Actually its kind of interesting to think of it that way because a lot of our raw mental data is ‘vectored’ already. But, whenever we do a linear regression of a dataset, that’s also a reduction-to-a-vector of something.
Like, I can draw a picture of a face in increasingly finer and finer detail down to “all the detail I see” but its still going to contain unifying assumptions—like a vector representation of a face, versus the data, which may be pixellated—made up of specific individual measurement events. Or I can show a chart of where and how all the nerves are excited in my eyes, which are the ‘raw data’ level stuff that I have access to about what’s ‘out there’, for which the simplest explanation is most probably a face. Actually its kind of interesting to think of it that way because a lot of our raw mental data is ‘vectored’ already. But, whenever we do a linear regression of a dataset, that’s also a reduction-to-a-vector of something.