The Influence Of Perception (Chapter 4)

In this section, Hofstadter discusses the idea of perception, representation, and analogical in relation to the human thought process. I found his discussion of perception in the first part of this section to be most interesting. Hofstadter briefly talks about low-level perception, which is mostly made up of processes we do not mentally control, such as visual and hearing sensors. Low-level perception obviously gets more complicated than our eyes and ears, but Hofstadter does not go into much detail about it.

Hofstadter goes into much more detail about high-level perception and the influences that effect this. This is what I feel makes perception more interesting than representation and analogy, the characteristic that it seems to be the most flexible and complex idea of the three. Some of the influences that can change one's perception of an idea or object that Hofstadter brings up are belief, goals, and context. Whether it be a preconceived notion, knowledge of the situation, or simply the context of a situation, these all can radically change the perception of something in the blink of an eye or from person to person.

This high-level perception also directly relates to previous sections in Hofstadter's book. One of these being the conceptual sphere Hofstadter talks about in earlier in the book. The example on page 174 which uses a piece of paper being viewed as a writing platform or a combustible material can be used to create a conceptual sphere. With the piece of paper being the core, all the different possible perceptions make up the rest of the sphere.

A second relation can be made to the Numbo and Jumbo problems. One of the main difficulties in designing these programs was to consider how different individuals may get different answers to the same problem. This is a prime example of how a persons knowledge on the subject has an influence of how someone perceives a problem.