Born To Do Math 203: Objects and Subjects
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/27
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If someone was to look out into the world, there appears to be objects. There appears to be subjects. You ask the question, “What is that object, or who is that to point out a subject?” How do those get slotted in thinking in an actual perception?
Rick Rosner: You’re talking about two different questions. One is how stuff is identified, and the second is how stuff is classified. You were pointing at this last night when talking about essentials.
I would argue with the essentials or at least things that you don’t know well or the things/the identifiers in your mind. I don’t know when you see a new person or when you see a car. For you to be able to remember that person or perceive the car, you have to do some classification work.
That’s largely a combination of conscious and less conscious. If the person’s got a broken nose, you’ll explicitly notice that. But there will be a bunch of other stuff about their face that you will note, but less consciously.
So, you’ll be able to identify him if you see him again in a half an hour. That means that for faces and for cars, we’ve got classification systems that we’re only like half aware of. We have a mental model and a subconscious or unconscious mental model of the different configurations the faces can take.
Then we see a new face, we map that person into that face in the face database. I don’t know if the face classification is as simple as all that, but probably so that you’ve got a number of different dimensions.
You find that person’s face along all these different dimensions, which is the same thing as finding a point in multidimensional face space. Except it’s not quite that easy because faces might have 30 or 50 potential dimensional characteristics, your average face won’t register along most of those dimensions.
You only plot that. You pick the dimensions that are appropriate for each face you classify. The broken nose might be an optional dimension of its own. It’s broken noses. There are interesting things like Brian Williams, the newscaster, has a nose that goes to one side, but he’s unconsciously learned to tilt it, to turn his head, just enough that his nose presents as less to the side than it would if he were perfectly squared up to the camera.
So, the broken nose is less noticeable. But anyway, you pick the dimensions, the face is distinctive along it, then you plot that in some face space. You do that with a lot of stuff. That you pick your dimensions.
And along with picking the dimensions, you pick along those dimensions the distinguishing characteristic, and then you contextualize the distinguishing characteristics; and that’s it. It’s not necessarily a dimension like somebody just mentioned, though.
We were watching a movie with Emma Stone from 10 years ago, where a character is described as six on the Kinsey sexuality scale, which is almost as gay as you can be. That’s a linear scale. I think it goes from one to seven or something.
We don’t necessarily rank like an eyebrow or a an ear along a bunch of dimensions. We contextualize the ear or the eyebrow or the busted nose with a comparison to other ones that we found notable.
Maybe, that does break down into classification along a bunch of linear dimensions. I don’t know. Maybe, that’s the most efficient way to classify information. But in any case, you can find the distinguishing characteristics and you contextualize, among other things, that have the same distinguishing characteristic, that aren’t the same tags. For that being a characteristic that’s notable, that’s it.
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