There is no concrete

1. There is no concrete For autonomous sensorimotor systems like us, all objects, whether primroses or prime numbers, are abstractions

2. What autonomous systems can do • see (sense, perceive, “discriminate relatively”) • learn • recognize (categorize kinds and individuals, “discriminate absolutely”)) • manipulate (Manipulate) • name (identify) • describe

3. Abstraction • Detecting invariants in variance • Features/parts/relations • Sensorimotor interactions • Gibsonian “affordances”

4. Foundations of Abstraction • Borges’s Funes the Memorious • Lurias’s “S”: The Mind of a Mnemonist • Watanabe’s “Ugly Dckling Theorem” • Miller’s “Magical Number 7 +/- 2”

5. Discrimination • Relative Discrimination: same/different judgments, analog matching, similarity judgment, more/less magnitude judgment, Just-Noticeable-Differences (JNDs) • Absolute Discrimination: (recognition, identification, sorting/labeling, naming)

6. Informational capacity limits • Relative discrimination: JNDs • Absolute discrimination: “chunks” • Serial memory limits • Rechunking • Recoding • Invariance extraction

7. Categorical perception • Implicit/Explicit learning/knowledge • Chicken-sexing • Biederman’s “geon” analysis

8. 3 ways of getting categories • Darwinian “theft” (innately prepared feature detectors • Sensorimotor “toil” (trial and error learning of categories from experience, with error-corrective feedback, “knowledge by acquaintance”) • Symbolic “theft” (learning from “hearsay”: “knowledge by description,” language)

9. How do autonomous systems access objects? • Through category detection • All category detection depends on abstraction: selectivity, invariance extraction • Objects are whatever affords absolute discriminability, whether kinds or individuals, from primroses to prime numbers