Tag Archives: understanding
21 Feb Pattern Recognition in Two Dimensions
Perceptual Grid We live in three dimensional space, and understanding three dimensions is critical to our ability to go places and do things, but we comprehend things in many dimensions. Our senses, however, tend to flatten things out. Images are projected on our light-sensitive retinas in exactly two-dimensional patterns. The rods and cones possess light-sensitive […]
20 Feb Learning Cause and Effect
Sparks of Kinesthesia When does a person begin to learn about the relationships between things that happen? Does the brain have an innate capacity to make the connections necessary to associate outcomes with catalysts? At what point does a person begin to learn that she or he can affect outcomes in the real world? One […]
18 Feb Insanity, Perception and Consciousness
Have you ever heard voices, seen people and things others can’t see, perceived colors, sounds or sensations that weren’t really there? The human mind has amazing abilities, sometimes giving us more output than is present in the input. Is this insanity, creativity or a fluke? I can’t answer these questions in this blog, but as we […]
17 Feb Call in the Reinforcements
I think of learning like photography. The length of time of the exposure and the width of the aperture determine whether the film or digital array receives sufficient light to capture the image. The focus of the lens is important too. As adults, we can sometimes control the number of times we return to a […]
15 Feb Perceptual Signatures
We will momentarily leave Yorrick in his warm, cozy waterbed, to consider perceptual signatures that take place in the world outside him. This world is characterized by patterns, visual, audio, aromatic, tactile and complex, that each have their own signature. The section of this blog on cognition, which deals with logic and reasoning, explores that […]
13 Feb Remember Yorrick
Mouldering Memories Sometimes dredging up old memories is a major operation in excavation. Yet we have an amazing capacity to retain information learned long ago and not recalled in recent memory. Today, I’d like to address questions of learning, especially in the context of the earliest learned things. In order to recognize something, we must […]
13 Feb Yorrick: Seeds of Knowledge
A Wise Geek once said: “Knowledge acquisition typically refers to the process of acquiring, processing, understanding, and recalling information through one of a number of methods. This is often a field of study closely tied to cognition, memory, and the way in which human beings are able to understand the world around them.” Our exploration begins […]
12 Feb Conscious Phenomena
Conscious Phenomena For the past few posts, I have been exploring consciousness. Extra-sensory perception is a part, or an extension of consciousness. Are you sometimes psychic? Some people have truly remarkable extra-sensory capabilities while others do not. I read a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, though I can’t for the life of me remember the […]
08 Feb Seeing Within: Proprioception for Robots
I saw a couple movies awhile back, “The Terminator” and “Terminator 2” in which artificial intelligence in computers became hazardous to the survival of humanity. One of the premises, as I recall, was that the critical event that lead to the disastrous attempt of man-made machines to destroy humanity, was when they became “self-aware”. This […]
05 Feb Rings of Power: Workflow and Business Rules
Gandalf the Wizard explained the writing on the “One Ring”: “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them“ Such a ring would be a nice thing to have, as long as it didn’t make you into a fascist – the […]