next up previous contents
Next: Fragments of a Language Up: The Well-designed Logical Robot Previous: Conservation


Continuity

Some philosophers and philosophically minded psychologists regard it as odd that we perceive our experience as continuous in time even though our nervous systems work discretely and our senses even more discretely. The spacial continuity of our spacial perceptions, e.g. visual, should be just as problematical. What tools should we give our logical robot child for dealing with this? What terms should we put in its language of thought?

I think it is to our advantage that we don't perceive the discontinuities in our perception of continuous motion or the discontinuous frames of a movie.

This allows us to get velocities by differentiating positions or having the speedometer in a car do it for us. Going 50 mph usually lasts longer than being at any particular location and is therefore part of the situation, e.g. .

A robot child might well be designed to perceive discontinuous frames of a TV image as continuous. Its high speed computation would allow it to also perceive the discrete sequence of frames.



John McCarthy
2008-09-18