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Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
The representation is being offered as the explanation for why you can recognize things, whether you should bite into a pie, and so forth.
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Not "why",
how.
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A representation is something that stands for something else. The issue is identifying the means by which "something that stands for something else" enables skilled or competent action.
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That is the issue
after one has already identified the importance of the concept. Then the hard work can begin.
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It will help if you can list some examples of representations. Clarification of terms will reduce the chance of us talking past one another.
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Representations are pretty much the projection of reality onto the ways we conceive of reality, soo come in many forms. The meaning of every word in this post is a representation, and if your representation differs from mine, even subtly, the communication is altered. A photograph is not a representation, it is also something in external reality, but a mental image is. If I can recognize someone, I must have a pre-existing representation of them. What we call familiarity is not the sum of our experiences, it is the sum of our representations.
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I take things like photos, paintings, blueprints, small plastic ships on a war operations room plotting table, and so forth as representations, that is, as things that stand for something else. You appear to be taking anything tangible or otherwise identifiable as a "label" that when present conjures up a "representation."
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I imagine three non-overlapping sets: tangibles, labels, and representations. Nothing that is tangible is a representation, but representations are the way we conceive of the tangibles, and labels are how we categorize them efficiently.
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Is there anything laying around the house or the office that you think is such a representation that could be conjured up by a label?
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No, only a witch can "conjure up" something laying around the house. Our minds can conjure up representations
derived from things lying around the house, and give them labels.
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The representations, then, are the behaviors of the system. Is that right?
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No, behaviors are something different, defined and accessed in other ways.
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The best way to understand a pawn is not to study just the pawn piece itself, but to see it in the context of action in an active chess game.
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No, that is the best way to understand
how a pawn behaves. (And we form other representations for that too.) It all depends on the question being asked-- someone could be enthralled with pawns, study their history and adorn their house with them, and have no idea how to play chess.
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You seem to be using the term "representation" to mean "whatever it is that allows me to do what I do."
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No, that would be silly. See above for the definition I'm using.
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It's that what is in the head is pretty much a replica of what is outside the head with the phenomena to be explained such as color added to the inside version.
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No wonder you don't like the concept of representation-- you are missing the whole point of what a representation is! A "replica" of what is outside does
not "fit" in your head, like a ship in a bottle. A representation is not a replica, that would fail its entire purpose of being something that
does "fit" inside our head.