How do we learning to distinguish chocolate from non-chocolate? There's been a fair amount of debate on this topic over the years. Academics, of course, have invented entire vocabularies to deal with it; they call it 'concept learning', or 'category learning', and they bash each other with learned tomes on the subject. You can read a summary of the issues here, on Wikipedia.
Most of us just eat the chocolate.
It is, however, an interesting debate, and the academics, when not busily bashing each other, have taken us a little further down the path to an understanding of how the mind works. We urgently need that understanding.
In my opinion, the ability to form concepts or categories is rooted in primitive neural structures that we share with animals. We can learn much about it by simply observing the way children learn.
Show a little girl a Sherman tank, for instance, and she will immediately grasp certain things--the tracks, the armor, the turret, etc. Show her a Tiger tank, and she will undoubtedly notice the heavier armor, and the 88 mm gun.
The question is, how will she get beyond the "Oh no; it's a Tiger tank--it will blow up my Sherman!" stage to, this is a TANK, and that Sherman is a TANK?
Eventually, she will understand the concept TANK, and when faced with an .88 mm flak gun, will understand that this is not a tank. This sort of concept formation will serve her well in the office-politics wars that plague our modern era.
Where was I? Ah yes, chocolate. Here is a chocolate duck from Harriet's Creations.
That's enough philosophizing. You will find some rather beautiful pictures of demolition machines smashing and crunching things on this page. Demolition machines don't categorize; they just do what they do.
Your horoscope for today has been encrypted.
Peace, order, and good government!
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