Well if that's what is meant by it, fine. — jamalrob
Third, the claim that perceptual experiences are essentially relational articulates the distinctive phenomenological character of perceptual experience, or ‘what it is like’ for a subject to have an experience. Fourth, given that veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational, they differ in kind to non-veridical experiences such as hallucinations. — Allen
If it's neither then how do you know that what you experience has anything to do with apples at all? — Harry Hindu
real apples in our brains — Harry Hindu
representations of them in our brains — Harry Hindu
sure, houses have back doors that you can't see when you're in the front garden, and the small woman I saw waiting outside my apartment building the other day was actually a pile of boxes, but apart from that kind of thing, appearance vs reality is a very troublesome opposition to me. — jamalrob
Uber’s self-driving car saw the pedestrian but didn’t swerve – report
Tuning of car’s software to avoid false positives blamed, as US National Transportation Safety Board investigation continues
Samuel Gibbs, Tue 8 May 2018 06.00 EDT
An Uber self-driving test car which killed a woman crossing the street detected her but decided not to react immediately, a report has said.
The car was travelling at 40mph (64km/h) in self-driving mode when it collided with 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg at about 10pm on 18 March. Herzberg was pushing a bicycle across the road outside of a crossing. She later died from her injuries.
Although the car’s sensors detected Herzberg, its software which decides how it should react was tuned too far in favour of ignoring objects in its path which might be “false positives” (such as plastic bags), according to a report from the Information. This meant the modified Volvo XC90 did not react fast enough.
↪Banno We're still on the topic of what it means to perceive. We agreed it implies an object and a mind perceiving it. This characterization seems to make biological sense, at least. It follows that there must be a causal chain 'starting' at the apple and 'ending' at a mind. (in brackets because nothing ever starts and ends beyond our subjective segmentation of time, it's all part of the big flow) — Olivier5
What I experience are person-sees-apple events, person-reaches-for-apple events and person-eats-apple events: which are all pretty clearly to do with apples. — bongo fury
I'm aware the correct answer is 'practice'. But to recognize an apple, one needs to have some clue about how apples look like. — Olivier5
real apples in our brains — Harry Hindu
representations of them in our brains — Harry Hindu
active participation in such events. — bongo fury
If there's no trace left of the experience in the person, then that person will have no way to connect new experiences with past ones. — Olivier5
That an organism can learn is beyond dispute. Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn. This ability must logically be supported by some biological mechanisms to somehow store some information and to retrieve or activate it later, usually regrouped under the term 'memory'. How memory works is an important area of cognitive research.Is that your view as a biologist? That an organism learns by storing and comparing traces? — bongo fury
That an organism can learn is beyond dispute. — Olivier5
Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn. — Olivier5
This ability must logically be... — Olivier5
supported by some biological mechanisms to store some information, usually regrouped under the term 'memory'. — Olivier5
Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn.
— Olivier5
:cool: — bongo fury
The most controversial presentation was “Animal-Like Learning in Mimosa Pudica,” an unpublished paper by Monica Gagliano, a thirty-seven-year-old animal ecologist at the University of Western Australia who was working in Mancuso’s lab in Florence. Gagliano, who is tall, with long brown hair parted in the middle, based her experiment on a set of protocols commonly used to test learning in animals. She focussed on an elementary type of learning called “habituation,” in which an experimental subject is taught to ignore an irrelevant stimulus. “Habituation enables an organism to focus on the important information, while filtering out the rubbish,” Gagliano explained to the audience of plant scientists. How long does it take the animal to recognize that a stimulus is “rubbish,” and then how long will it remember what it has learned? Gagliano’s experimental question was bracing: Could the same thing be done with a plant?
Mimosa pudica, also called the “sensitive plant,” is that rare plant species with a behavior so speedy and visible that animals can observe it; the Venus flytrap is another. When the fernlike leaves of the mimosa are touched, they instantly fold up, presumably to frighten insects. The mimosa also collapses its leaves when the plant is dropped or jostled. Gagliano potted fifty-six mimosa plants and rigged a system to drop them from a height of fifteen centimetres every five seconds. Each “training session” involved sixty drops. She reported that some of the mimosas started to reopen their leaves after just four, five, or six drops, as if they had concluded that the stimulus could be safely ignored. “By the end, they were completely open,” Gagliano said to the audience. “They couldn’t care less anymore.”
Was it just fatigue? Apparently not: when the plants were shaken, they again closed up. “ ‘Oh, this is something new,’ ” Gagliano said, imagining these events from the plants’ point of view. “You see, you want to be attuned to something new coming in. Then we went back to the drops, and they didn’t respond.” Gagliano reported that she retested her plants after a week and found that they continued to disregard the drop stimulus, indicating that they “remembered” what they had learned. Even after twenty-eight days, the lesson had not been forgotten. She reminded her colleagues that, in similar experiments with bees, the insects forgot what they had learned after just forty-eight hours. Gagliano concluded by suggesting that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning,” and that there is “some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn.” — https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant
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