Recognizing things

[lettered]

What defines an object for you? And is there a word for the traits you define it by, which might be different than the traits other people use?

• My mom says my purse is just like my old purse. I think they are completely different, because of the shape, strap, and hardware. She doesn’t think the shape and strap are that different. I realized the things that matter to me about the shape and strap are different, thus making it feel like a completely different object. The reason it matters has to do with how I use the purse, but I feel this isn’t an issue of me comparing function while she’s comparing form-I’m sure she’s considering function too, but because she uses it differently, she doesn’t see the same things I do (and I don’t see the things she does).
• This made me think about casting in movies, when a child and a blood-parent have to be cast, or a young-version and an old-version have to be cast. You can usually see which features were selected by the casting director to “carry” over into the descendent/parent or younger/older!versions-but it’s not always what you personally think makes someone look like them.
• For my work I had to do some research on how the brain recognizes objects. When you encounter an object, you notice various aspects-it’s shape, color, size, texture, etc. When you encounter like objects (called the same thing) several more times, your brain creates a category that links these things. When you see a new object and enough criteria are met, you recognize the object-therefore, you can look at a car you have never seen before and recognize it is a car. But if you encountered a banana that was blue and a pyramid shape, you would probably not recognize it as a banana, even if it tasted, felt, and smelled the same.
• Think about this enough, and you’re back at Plato’s forms, in which there is a form that is Cat. You define cats as furry animals with four legs and pointy ears, but a hairless cat is still a cat, and a 3-legged cat is still a cat, and in fact a hairless, legless, earless cat is still a cat. They have in common their catness, because they reflect some essential Cat form.
• And after thinking about that you arrive at the Ship of Thesus, in which a famous ship sits in a museum, but over time pieces of it rot or break and are therefore replace. Over centuries every single part of the ship is replaced; is it still the Ship of Thesus?

Tl;dr, my mom and I are never going to agree about this purse.

This entry was originally posted to Dreamwidth. Read Comments | Reply