<< almost any measurement one cares to make (with eyes, even) produces endless ambiguities and coincidences that you have to "be in the world" to resolve; and resolution is a dynamic process which you "have to be here for". >>
Sounds like a magic view of the mind to me.
It's suspicious that this is never said about the function of Liver or Kidneys, only about the function of the Brain.
Maybe the brain is protecting itself, like if you ask a cow about steaks.
The way we can tell if a stick is bent, or not, in a fluid is to remove the stick.
Animals arent magic, theyre just actually present in the world.
The converse is true: if the world's structure could be uncovered by data analysis, then it would be something like The Matrix; and the whole history of science would be falsified. It turns out the hardwork of experiment was never required, one could just blindly measure anything in any way, and somehow, knowledge would be produced.
> one could just blindly measure anything in any way, and somehow, knowledge would be produced.
Is this not what astronomers do? Sure they also have inputs from experiments made on Earth, but the actual investigation of "the stars" is reliant solely on data analysis.
What is the structure of the world if not the correlations in some measurement data?
So (trying to grok this) in order to "know" I have picked the box up, I can feel its weight, wave my hand in the empty space etc. I am "in the world" and use side channels to build my own reward function for my own eyesight. (presumably this is the first 9+ months of life.
if I only had eyesight i could not build a reward function ?
Does this mean AI could do this if they had other sensors like weight gauges in the servos?
Well the body has properties which enable it to formulate concepts which begin simply as motor techniques. It is unlikely that servos have the right properties, but it's an open question.
I strongly suspect the body's ability to organize itself at the cellur-to-organ level over time, ie., to grow, is an essential component of how we develop & deploy novel motor techniques.
It is these techniques which we use to resolve the ambiguity inherent within any system of measurement -- we, of course, learn to see -- but i think "learn" here is really a complex form of motor control which ends up structruing our perception and then reflexivily, we build on that to develop more motor techniques.
We learn to see in the sense that we first learn to move, then we see better, and we cycle until we're building electron microscopes. Explicit cognition is really just a book-keeping/accounting system to tidy up this process. In modelling only this, we're relying on "doing all the hardwork" for machines.
Intelligence isnt what cognition does when it tidy's up your concepts, its the very having of those concepts. Cognition is a big, largely neurotic unself-aware misdirection. It's what academics think is important -- failing to notice they have any body at all.
They only got their cherished abstractions by first moving their meat -- and whilst that can be dropped for the most pure and formal of ideas (eg., arithmetic) -- it cannot be dropped for discovery as such.
Sounds like a magic view of the mind to me.
It's suspicious that this is never said about the function of Liver or Kidneys, only about the function of the Brain.
Maybe the brain is protecting itself, like if you ask a cow about steaks.