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Three Abilities to Underpin Knowledge of Objects

 

Three Abilities to Underpin Knowledge of Objects

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The question for this lecture concerns knowledge of physical objects. When do humans first come to know simple facts about particular physical objects? To illustrate, consider the fact that this telephone is located here, or the fact that this telephone is square. I take it that no one is born knowing any such facts. So there was a time when you knew no facts about particular physical objects at all, and then, sometime later, you came to know some such facts. How did you make this transition? How do humans first come to know facts about particular objects?
(For the rest of this lecture I'll drop the qualifier `physical' since this is all about physical objects as opposed to, say, abstract objects like numbers or forms.)

knowledge of physical objects

objects
 

have boundaries

persist through time
 

causally interact

knowledge of objects
involves

segmenting them

representing them as perstising

tracking their causal interactions

Knowledge of objects depends on abilities to (i) segment objects, (ii) represent them as persisting and (iii) track their interactions.
Let's look at each of these in turn.
[ducks picture] The way objects are ordinarily arranged in space, so that one occludes parts of another, prevents us from doing this in any simple way.

objects
 

have boundaries

persist through time
 

causally interact

knowledge of objects
involves

segmenting them

representing them as perstising

tracking their causal interactions

When Hannah hides behind the logs and a girl later pops up, we can ask whether it is Hannah again or another girl. That is, we know that objects can persist despite disappering from view---and despite becoming entirely imperceptible.

objects
 

have boundaries

persist through time
 

causally interact

knowledge of objects
involves

segmenting them

representing them as perstising

tracking their causal interactions

Objects causally interact with each other; one pan supports another, two people collide and bounce off each other. Relatedly, objects have counterfactual lives: sometimes you can say, truly, that if that barrier had not been there, the car would be at the bottom of the valley now.

objects
 

have boundaries

persist through time
 

causally interact

knowledge of objects
involves

segmenting them

representing them as perstising

tracking their causal interactions

How do humans come to meet the three requirements on knowledge of objects?

As mentioned, the question we'd like to answer is how humans first come to know any facts about particular physical objects. Before you know any such facts you live in something like a world of mere features. In this feature world, nothing persists and there are no causal interactions only patterns. And nothing exists except in your perceptual fields.
Now the question of how humans make this transition to knowing some facts about particular physical objects is too hard to face head on. But we can approach it by asking,
The question for this lecture is,
How do humans come to meet the three requirements on knowledge of objects?