Vlad,
I just feel that a process based on previous knowledge is more appropriate for skills acquisition than handling novelty.
No really. Actually one way of thinking of consciousness is as a novelty processing machine – it’s because it has the characteristics of problem solving, pattern finding etc that it can navigate the new, which is a huge asset in evolutionary terms and so has become embedded over time.
We are still not at the point of matching with novelty.
Yes we are. See above.
In the simple case of purple tigers of course there is a match purple and tiger. But not all novel situations are that convenient.
No they’re not, but the principle is the same regardless of how novel the situation. That’s why I started with a novel snowflake, then the purple tiger. The next one if you like could be a turquoise oojamaflip – a previously undiscovered species we'd then try to classify (does it lay eggs or give birth to live young? etc) to figure out its taxonomy. And if it didn’t fit within an existing species, genus, family, order, class, phylum etc then we'd describe a new one.
Whether we like it or not we are still left with the problem which will never be answered by looking to the past and that is the 'shock of the new'. At the moment commentators on this thread have treated novelty as though it is a walk in the park when what they are really alluding to is the familiar.
Nope. The “shock of the new” is amenable to the tools and methods of experience – from new species to beetle to quasars, it doesn’t matter much. If ever something was discovered that was so outside our ability to process it then all we’d have is a “don’t know” because that’s the point at which our intellects had run out.
I did criticise Torridon for almost explaining novely away by declaring it a rarity. Novelty cannot be a rarity but lets examine where we could have gone had he eliminated novelty......He would have been suggesting probably that the universe is comprised of basic forms which are everywhere and are just being rearranged............remember the old adage that there is nothing new under the sun.
That’s pretty much was the evidence tells us, yes: relatively few basic components in endlessly varied arrangements. Very often we can define and explain those arrangements, and sometimes we can’t. The latter group is pretty much the reason people still do science - to process the novel.
But that also goes beyond any pat explanation that novelty is dealt with by memory and of course all this is before we get to decision making
That’s a straw man – it’s not “memory” in the sense that a SatNav has a memory of street plans, it’s
experience that entails tools and methods the deal precisely with the novel.
