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Re: Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Adding a bit to the "oh no, what's going to happen to us?" aspect of this from Douglas Hofstadter - in essence, that the perceptual mode of acquiring info is not relevant - from "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html "In fact, I should stress that the upper echelons of high-level perception totally transcend the normal flavor of the word “perception,” for at the highest levels, input modality plays essentially no role. Let me explain. Suppose I read a newspaper article about the violent expulsion of one group of people by another group from some geographical region, and the phrase “ethnic cleansing,” nowhere present in the article, pops into my head. What has happened here is a quintessential example of high-level perception — but what was the input medium? Someone might say it was vision, since I used my eyes to read the newspaper. But really, was I perceiving ethnic cleansing visually? Hardly. Indeed, I might have heard the newspaper article read aloud to me and had the same exact thought pop to mind. Would that mean that I had aurally perceived ethnic cleansing? Or else I might be blind and have read the article in Braille — in other words, with my fingertips, not my eyes or ears. Would that mean that I had tactilely perceived ethnic cleansing? The suggestion is absurd. The sensory input modality of a complex story is totally irrelevant; all that matters is how it jointly activates a host of interrelated concepts, in such a way that further concepts (e.g., “ethnic cleansing”) are automatically accessed and brought up to center stage..." Relevant...? The whole essay is worth a read I think. And, whether we're talking about uncertain veracity regarding web content or the prevalence of spam (re: Jennifer Granick's, Free the Spam King) user knowledge and experience may be most important. Lauren
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