After my discussion of Tversky the other day, a reader wrote to remind me of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of perception. Critcizing my paper on Relevant Similarity, the reader wrote, "it is the primacy of our perceptions, which are similar to each other (in terms of how and what we generally perceive) that is the tool for our cognition." Quite right, but to clarify, this is why a system of formal reasoning is inadequate to explain cognition, because if this is all we have, the senses are not sufficient for the task that they actually accomplish. There's a lot in Merleau-Ponty that I like, and especially this: "Habit, and the production of schemes in regards to the body's mobilisation, 'gives our life the form of generality and prolongs our personal acts into stable dispositions" (PP 146). This tendency of our body to seek its own equilibrium and to form habits, is an infinitely important component of Merleau-Ponty's body-subject..." Read Merleau-Ponty and think McLuhan. I need to pull all these thoughts together, because they are related: the nature of similarity, the diffusion of information in a network, causality, interpretation, context, learning, blogging, the semantic social network and the self-organizing web.
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