Michele Pasin / Quotes

A frog's eye is not a camera

Importantly, the frog will persist with this behaviour. It will never adapt its behaviour in light of the unsuccessful attempts to capture the fly. The moral of the story is that a frog’s eye does not act as a camera supplying information to the frog’s planning module, which then constructs a plan to catch the fly.

Saved 15 June 2022 / www.amazon.com ↗

#perception #representation #animals #action

Causal relations are all there is to a belief

Beliefs, for example, are caused by perceptions and together with desires they cause actions. Such causal relations are all that there is to having a belief.

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #functionalism #beliefs #perception #action

Dragonflies fooled by polarized light

Donald Hoffman relates the following example about dragonflies to illustrate the idea that biological perception does not report the truth about the world…

Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) #perception #evolution #truth #animals

Condemned to treat representations as the world

“Many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned…

Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) #representation #knowledge #experience #perception

The plasticity principle

even if our own private experiences are purely creations of our brains. To paraphrase the late neurobiologist (and Buddhist) Francisco Varela, we are…

Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) #brain #representation #perception #neuroscience

The representative theory of perception

How do I know that the representation really represents, or represents accurately? Descartes’ view was common in the seventeenth century. It is called the…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #perception #representation #knowledge

We perceive only the contents of our minds

It is important to understand that on Descartes’ view we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. What we directly perceive, that…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #perception #representation #dualism