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5 The Mind-Made Firmament
ing mechanisms are introduced by evolution, so that each individual can finetune its species-specific behavior in innovative ways learned by experience.
However, the most decisive leap forward in the development of animal
behavior came with the gradual evolution of world models for representing
the environment. A world model is a hierarchy of Gestalt representations of
the essential objects and forces in the environment as they affect individuals
of a species. Once an animal has a model of reality in mind, every occurrent
event is referred to the animal’s world model where it finds a context which
relates the event to similar past events, and points to options for responding. It
likewise enables the animal to perceive the likely consequences of each response
option, thereby making decisions possible.
Category Formation. Reification
One of the simplest things that all people do naturally is to discern common
features in different objects, and common patterns in different events. Experiments in animal behavior have shown that very simple creatures do this as
naturally as we do. The capacity for abstracting particular characteristics out
of everyday objects or situations would seem to be a sophisticated ability, but
in fact it is widely distributed among living beings and seems to be a built-in
feature of all animal brains. Every original or creative solution to a problem—
even the very simplest one—is founded on the ability to perceive general,
abstract properties that many objects have in common.
If creatures were not able to generalize then every object in the world would
be one-of-a-kind: Each would demand its own specific response and way of
dealing with it. Every object would only be recognized individually, perhaps by
some kind of template identification, for there would be no general features.
There would be as many different things in the world as stars on a winter night.
No brain would have the capacity to deal with such a huge array of different,
unrelated things.
The ability to abstract and generalize is crucial also for the construction of
ontologies. What we are doing when we generalize is this: We lift a feature or
property out of its natural context and make it into a concrete existing entity.
The thing that we have abstracted out in this fashion can now be recognized
when it is embedded in other contexts. This process is an incredibly powerful
means of simplifying the world and giving it structure.
Many of the words in our vocabulary refer to immaterial forces or abstractions that are reified out of common experiences—that is, abstracted out of
them and made into independent entities. For instance, having noted that
5 The Mind-Made Firmament
ing mechanisms are introduced by evolution, so that each individual can finetune its species-specific behavior in innovative ways learned by experience.
However, the most decisive leap forward in the development of animal
behavior came with the gradual evolution of world models for representing
the environment. A world model is a hierarchy of Gestalt representations of
the essential objects and forces in the environment as they affect individuals
of a species. Once an animal has a model of reality in mind, every occurrent
event is referred to the animal’s world model where it finds a context which
relates the event to similar past events, and points to options for responding. It
likewise enables the animal to perceive the likely consequences of each response
option, thereby making decisions possible.
Category Formation. Reification
One of the simplest things that all people do naturally is to discern common
features in different objects, and common patterns in different events. Experiments in animal behavior have shown that very simple creatures do this as
naturally as we do. The capacity for abstracting particular characteristics out
of everyday objects or situations would seem to be a sophisticated ability, but
in fact it is widely distributed among living beings and seems to be a built-in
feature of all animal brains. Every original or creative solution to a problem—
even the very simplest one—is founded on the ability to perceive general,
abstract properties that many objects have in common.
If creatures were not able to generalize then every object in the world would
be one-of-a-kind: Each would demand its own specific response and way of
dealing with it. Every object would only be recognized individually, perhaps by
some kind of template identification, for there would be no general features.
There would be as many different things in the world as stars on a winter night.
No brain would have the capacity to deal with such a huge array of different,
unrelated things.
The ability to abstract and generalize is crucial also for the construction of
ontologies. What we are doing when we generalize is this: We lift a feature or
property out of its natural context and make it into a concrete existing entity.
The thing that we have abstracted out in this fashion can now be recognized
when it is embedded in other contexts. This process is an incredibly powerful
means of simplifying the world and giving it structure.
Many of the words in our vocabulary refer to immaterial forces or abstractions that are reified out of common experiences—that is, abstracted out of
them and made into independent entities. For instance, having noted that