TOK notes 2-01-02 Friday

We started with a quiz on the reading from the book, "How does the Mind
Work?" by Steven Pinker.

Basically, the excerpt talked about how difficult the problems our brains
solve routinely are. The first example given was locomotion. Next, the
difficulty of common sense was mentioned. Several examples were given in
the reading.

For example, if you apply the literal definition of 'bachelor' to a number
of situations, you get the opposite outcome of if you apply your
'common sense' definition of the term. Yet, everyone is able to apply that
common sense definition, even though it's not written anywhere.

The difficulty of programming common sense was brought to light. The robot
example was given. When it was finally programmed to compute side effects,
it still blew up because there were infintiely many to compute.

The difficult of common sense is how do we only determine the relative
side effects of our actions.

Finally the other problem we talked about was face recognition. We humans
do it effortlessly - how? We can often see someone only once, not even
talk to them, but recognize their face. We can also tell who someone is
even if we haven't seen them for years and they look different. It turns
out that we have a special faculty for face recognition. How could this
work?