Well a “stacking” mechanism “similarity” could be whatever you want in principle, yes. That then generates the “feeling-of-similarity”, so you might be right in that sense. But that’s not the same as saying we humans get to choose what “feeling-of-similarity” we’re going to perceive. I think we’re locked in to this shared context/prediction grouping property. That’s something specific. We will only perceive objects in the world if they share some kind of predictive destiny. Like the different atoms in a football, say. In fact, but also perceptually for our visual system, what makes them an object will be that the different parts of a football tend to share contexts and predictive effects.
But that’s not the only way it could be done. Another one of my favourite references on this is some work done on “reverse engineering” I saw in a talk some years back. In this talk, I see the presenter proposing dynamic, generative, relational principles to generate new perceptual “objects” (as I recall… locality preservation, and… some kind of fractal transform… or maybe it’s the fractal transformation which is the locality preserving one!) It’s only because the dynamic generative way he determines “objects” is a dynamical generative property like the grouping principles I am proposing, that I see what he is doing as an analogue to human perception. These “objects” and the relational principles on which they are generated, are totally non-human. Humans cannot see them. But he finds them useful for other purposes. Purposes humans have not evolved to carry out effectively. For instance, he uses them to find images in binary data. Or crypto-graphic keys. Stuff humans are completely blind to. At best learning a few common patterns with time. It’s a completely inhuman relational principle. Like the mechanism I’m suggesting for human perception, it also constantly generates new “objects”, but these are non-human objects.
I think of it as examples how an alien intelligence might differ from ours (at least in the sense of the way it might resolve the world into perceptual objects.
Christopher Domas The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization
