Hume N Perception
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

Let me see if I can patch together (and edit) my favorite parts of this article into something of a summary.

Assume my senses interact with distinct outside and inside worlds. By outside world, I mean a real, objective reality. This outside world has a complicated structure which is not directly apparent to me, but I can perceive it through my senses. By inside world I mean my memories, my model of the world, which is stored in my cortex. These memories have been collected and structured over years of interaction with the outside world, and I’ve tried to build them up in a way so that their complicated structure matches the complicated structure of the outside world.

My inside world can be viewed as a set of beliefs about propositions. I’m confident in these propositions with varying degrees of probability. Having seen many white swans over the years, I’m confident with a high degree of probability that ‘whiteness’ and the other features which make up swans are highly correlated.

The reliability of my internal world can be established by interacting with the outside world. If, according to my internal world, when I drop a heavy object it always falls to the ground, then when upon dropping a hammer and observing it fall to the ground, I become ever more confident in the reliability of my internal world (scientific method). My confidence in the isomorphism between the external and internal worlds can also strengthen when I talk to other people who appear to have similar elements of their internal world to me.

Intelligence is the ability to construct an internal world which is isomorphic to the external world, given interaction with this world. Greater intelligence means a faster rate at which the internal world is constructed to match the external world. Also, greater intelligence means an ability to avoid suboptimal, inaccurate internal worlds. More intelligent people are more likely to come to the correct understanding of the world. ‘Understanding’ is the state of having an accurate model of the external world in your internal world.

A belief — a part of my internal world — is built from old ones. Knowledge of the external world is a hierarchy of connections, where more and more complicated concepts are constructed from concepts closer to raw sensation. An open mind is willing to entertain tentative and new beliefs that contradict old beliefs. This prevents the internal world from getting stuck in a local optimum. An open mind is the only mind that can overcome socially ingrained base beliefs and choose most wisely.

The mechanism by which our cortices were designed to accurately construct an internal world was evolution. Evolution bestowed upon us the ability to accurately construct models of the external world because accurate models (the best beliefs) enabled more successful survival and reproduction. Complex language evolved in order to bridge the gap between different humans’ internal worlds, which dramatically increased our ability to form accurate internal worlds.

I’m not sure what the proof is.

QED.

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Hume N Perception

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perception, reasoning, induction, neural networks, artificial intelligence, categories, concepts, analogies, unsupervised learning, pattern completion