If you haven't read them I think you will greatly enjoy Douglas
Hofstadter's [1] books: Godel, Escher, Bach and his recent one, I am a
Strange Loop.
The first being one of the most enjoyable, fascinating, and at times
difficult to grok, books on earth. In it he explores this general idea
of self-recursive loops from many, many different perspectives.
Including in musical form, formal mathematical systems, cognitive
science, and art. The second is from much later in his career, working
mostly as a cognitive scientist, and it focuses on this self recursive
component of perception and consciousness. Also a good read, but I
would absolutely go for GEB first if you haven't read it.
From a more CS point of view, people have been working on recursive
neural networks for years, which is a programmatic model depicting
exactly this duality of perception and cognition. Another really great
read that gets into this kind of programmatic model of intelligence and
perception is On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. He is a programmer and
the founder of Palm computing, but his hobby is neuroscience, so it's
kind of "your brain from a computer geeks perspective." It's pretty
well respected by my neuroscience/AI buddies, but it's a very accessible
read even for someone with zero neuroscience background.
-Jeff
[1]:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter
alex wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've got a question for the philosophers among us...
>
> When we hear music we perceive rhythm in terms of meter, and infer
> meter from the rhythm. When we hear a sound we perceive it in terms
> of the instrument that made it, and infer the instrument from the
> sound. When we see a figure in a picture we perceive it in terms of
> the ground behind it, and infer the ground from the figure. We
> understand a linguistic statement in terms of a metaphorical
> structure, which we infer from the statement. When we have a
> conversation we build perceive words in terms of the person who says
> it, and build a picture of the person in terms of the words they say.
>
> This seems to be a general structure of experience -- perceiving
> something in terms of underlying structure which inferred by the
> something you're perceiving. I think this must be something that
> philosophers have thought about, psychologists too. Does it have a
> name? What should I read to understand it better?
>
> Cheers
>
> alex
>
Received on Fri Sep 25 2009 - 10:49:31 BST