Consider a Lego person

By -

Here.

Lego people are the wrong size to be humans. They have no nose or ears. Their legs are columns, their hands often hooks. Their "skin" feels nothing like human skin, and they are room temperature... I'm sure you could keep going.

And yet they function as model people, so well that very young children (by 20 months?) are able to recognize them as such and play with them.

How does this work?

Comments

  1. Matt6:59 PM

    I think the emotive facial expressions are key (and kids pick up on these early). The difference between a bald Lego man and a Lego robot is the curve of the mouth.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ken B10:49 PM

    The mind is not a blank slate. We have inbuilt circuits for recognizing human-like features, and for "detecting" humanness. False positives are unavoidable.

    This is impossible to turn off I find. I watch Murray Rothbard on Youtube and despite knowing better think I am watching a human being!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah11:59 PM

      :-)

      Delete
    2. gcallah12:00 AM

      Yes, but what I am after is really about modeling in general: how do we see, say, an Edgeworth Box diagram as a "model" of a choice situation?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more