Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> What would it even mean in practice for them to think about concrete "walking" instead of the abstract concept? Verbs are inherently abstract.

Your example of the leash and the concept of "walking" is an excellent point.

To answer your question, all proper nouns are not abstract by definition. Your name refers to you, specifically and concretely, it does not refer to the concept of "person" or "people."

But to take this further, imagine the following thought experiment:

You have a newborn infant, and you isolate them from the rest of the world (remember this is a thought experiment, so we are not bound by ethical considerations for this purpose). You show them 3 identical staplers. You call the first one "Foo", the second one "Bar" and the 3rd one "Baz."

An infant might, on their own as they grow and mature, start to abstract and conceptualize a concept of a logical grouping here. They might observe that Foo, Bar and Baz have similarities and, being humans, they might even come up with some kind of verbal or non-verbal cue to reference this abstract concept.

But for a while at least, these are individual concretes. If all they ever see is one single concrete "stapler", they may learn to associate the word with the concrete and never even think about abstracting it. But if they do start to abstract it upon observation of similar "things" ... to what degree are non-humans capable of doing that?

You provide a lot of good evidence that dogs can to some degree. But to what extent? What are the limitations?

These are unanswered questions in both science and philosophy.

I hope I answered your question, as it was a valid one. I'm not giving answers to these hypotheses and philosophical conjectures. I'm saying that this is something that is still not quite figured out yet.

> I hope I answered your question

It was mostly rethorical, but thanks :)

BTW I think the concrete proper nouns we use (like "Eve") are actually abstractions too and prove some reasoning capability.

At first infants don't realize objects exist. They just see shapes and react to them. When something disappears from their view - it's the same as if it stopped existing. That's why you can play peekaboo with them and not bore them.

To abstract from "a shape that sometimes appears, moves and disappears" to "an object that exists over time even when it's not visible" is a pretty impressive generalization. If AI was able to do it on its own I would be impressed at least. I'd even say it's more impressive than the next step (generalizing from "mom' and "papa" to "person").

Of course we have hardware in our brains dedicated for this stuff and it's probably not conscious reasoning that gets us the object permanence. And we don't remember it in any case. So we take it for granted.

But when you think about it the generalization from "sensations in my eyes" to "objects in the world" is a pretty big one.

It gets even wilder than that.

There is a psychological concept called "anchoring" which associates two different things perceptually. For example, it's what happens when you listen to a song during a particular time in your life, and then many years later you hear the song and feel all the things you felt in that moment with all of the memories triggered etc.

You make a good point about language itself being some form of abstraction in reference to the objective world. But this conversation reminds me of a famous artwork called "The Treachery of Images." It is a painting of a tobacco pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe" in English).

Through the painting, we can appreciate that a picture of a pipe is an abstraction that represents a pipe, and is not the same thing as a pipe itself. It is a painting that appeals directly to reason.

The philosophical and scientific question is: when a dog hears the word "walk", or sees a leash, is it conceptual abstraction at play; the understanding of a logical category... or is it emotional anchoring that came about through Pavlovian conditioning and having that word associated with a memory of a concrete?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com