Newsgroups: alt.consciousness
References: <20010930102516.05936.00001160@mb-ba.aol.com>
Subject: Re: Aaron S. / book  comments
From: Aaron.Sloman.XX@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman See text for reply address)

[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]

loonii@aol.com (Loonii) wrote to me pointing out that he had posted
a comment.

This was apparently a response to my message posted to the psyche-b
discussion list.

     http://listserv.uh.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0109&L=psyche-b&F=&S=&P=1199

This message announced availability of a free online version of my out
of print 1978 book, The Computer Revolution in Philosophy at this URL

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/crp/

I also made some comments on vision to which he responded

> Date: 30 Sep 2001 14:25:16 GMT
> Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
>
> >(...) because much of normal sight is "blind-sight" -- <
>
> If I were blind I'd not see at all.

I was assuming that people reading the psycbe-b postings would be
aware of research on "blind sight" in which people with certain
kinds of brain damage claim not to be able see yet when asked to
point at something do so successfully: i.e. they have a competence
which usually goes with sight, but they lack the awareness of having
sight, hence "blind-sight". There's a lot of literature on this,
though I am not an expert. E.g. see
    http://cognet.mit.edu/MITECS/Entry/stoerig
or
       Weiskrantz, L. (1986). Blindsight: A Case Study and
        Implications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


> When coming to normal sight, I might not regard the sequencer's or whatever as
> being blind nor my own.
>
> My own just like MBD baud rate.

I don't understand any of that. Sorry.

You seem to be referring to a type of deficit that I do not
recognize, and I don't know what sort of sequencer is being
referred to.

> Concerning some posture control due to something I heard I assumed that there
> is some structure near the ear that is to do with that.

There is a huge amount of published literature on this sort of
thing. I was referring to the fact that there are experiments which
show that we use optical flow in posture control even though we are
not aware of the fact that there is any optical flow. Work on this
was reported many years ago by David Lee at Edinburgh university.

> I am not sure anymore
> if there were several ring-like bones or something else and some fluid where
> the position of that was relevant? Whatever, if I recall right it was relevant
> for balances.

I was referring to something different.. It seems that I wrongly
assumed that people on the discussion list would recognize the
allusion. Apologies for lack of explicitness.

>
> >(...) More subtly, we are unaware of many of the visual "affordances" that
> contribute to our
> abilities to learn, decide, act, etc.<
>
> What does "affordance" mean? (And why do I even bother to ask English
> vocabulary?)

"affordance" is a technical term coined by the psychologist
JJ Gibson in his theory of vision. It is well known to scientists
who study vision. See
    J.J Gibson,
    The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception,
    Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 1986,
    (originally published in 1979),

I have the impression that you really are not interested in the work
I reported though I cannot tell whether you have read it or are
reacting only to the summary in the email message.

Since most of your comments are not related to the work I was
referring to, I guess I should let your points stand unopposed.
We seem to be interested in different topics.

I apologise if I wasted your time.

Best wishes.

Aaron
====
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html