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Recognizing things
What defines an object for you? And is there a word for the traits you define it by, which might be different than the traits other people use?
Tl;dr, my mom and I are never going to agree about this purse.
- My mom says my purse is just like my old purse. I think they are completely different, because of the shape, strap, and hardware. She doesn’t think the shape and strap are that different. I realized the things that matter to me about the shape and strap are different, thus making it feel like a completely different object. The reason it matters has to do with how I use the purse, but I feel this isn’t an issue of me comparing function while she’s comparing form—I’m sure she’s considering function too, but because she uses it differently, she doesn’t see the same things I do (and I don’t see the things she does).
- This made me think about casting in movies, when a child and a blood-parent have to be cast, or a young-version and an old-version have to be cast. You can usually see which features were selected by the casting director to “carry” over into the descendent/parent or younger/older!versions—but it’s not always what you personally think makes someone look like them.
- For my work I had to do some research on how the brain recognizes objects. When you encounter an object, you notice various aspects—it’s shape, color, size, texture, etc. When you encounter like objects (called the same thing) several more times, your brain creates a category that links these things. When you see a new object and enough criteria are met, you recognize the object—therefore, you can look at a car you have never seen before and recognize it is a car. But if you encountered a banana that was blue and a pyramid shape, you would probably not recognize it as a banana, even if it tasted, felt, and smelled the same.
- Think about this enough, and you’re back at Plato’s forms, in which there is a form that is Cat. You define cats as furry animals with four legs and pointy ears, but a hairless cat is still a cat, and a 3-legged cat is still a cat, and in fact a hairless, legless, earless cat is still a cat. They have in common their catness, because they reflect some essential Cat form.
- And after thinking about that you arrive at the Ship of Thesus, in which a famous ship sits in a museum, but over time pieces of it rot or break and are therefore replace. Over centuries every single part of the ship is replaced; is it still the Ship of Thesus?
Tl;dr, my mom and I are never going to agree about this purse.
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My tendency to catalogue characters by hairstyle or personality instead of facial features has occasionally led to confusion when I say two characters are alike, when to someone with better facial recognition they look completely different.
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(Anonymous) 2019-02-07 05:28 am (UTC)(link)I am actually pretty good at facial recognition, but have a weird blindness when it comes to glasses and facial hair. I honestly can't remember whether most people I know have glasses or facial hair, and sometimes can't recognize what's different if they remove either. Sometimes I'll even say something like "did you get a haircut?" Which is funny, because I recognize haircuts right away.
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The European understanding of preservation is different: we want the exact same thing. Not a thing that was replicated in the exact same likeness.
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I used to work at a museum where we taught about dinosaurs, and when we showed a fossil the number one question was, "is that real?" It's such a stupid question, because a) yes it exists in the corporeal world? b) fossils are not the thing they preserve unless it's an amber/ice/tar type of fossil; if you're looking at a fossil of a bone it is not a bone and was never a bone; it's mineral that filled in where the bone was, c) as a result of b it really doesn't matter if what you're looking at is the actual fossil or an exact replica of the fossil, because the fossil is just an exact replica anyway, so replicas are just as useful as the original if they're precisely made.
I mean, most of the people asking the questions were kids, and I can understand why the question felt important to them because they're struggling all the time between fiction and reality; it was when the parents asked that straight off the bat and then dismissed it because it wasn't "real" that I got truly annoyed.
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I am curious too about why your mom, on some level, wants the purse to be the same. It's an argument she feels compelled to make, I mean, and that's interesting in and of itself.
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I, on some level, do not want the purse to be the same, so it goes both ways. I think part of it is she got me the purse, and then she went and got the same purse (actually the same purse), then said it was the best purse, because it was just like her old purse. I think it is the best purse and not like her old purse at all. But I think she thinks of it as a compliment to her taste and my taste that we both like the same thing.
Meanwhile, I have certain opinions about purses that have to do with gender, feminism, materialism/capitalism, and misogyny, and I like my purse because to me it doesn't look like a purse (I think the company sells it as a man's bag, even though it is obviously a purse). Because my mom doesn't think/care about the gender issues, and in some way sorta buys into some of the culture surrounding purses, I probably have identified my mom's purse (the one she had when I was growing up that is what she things my purse looks like) as very pursey, and thus as also playing into these issues, which is probably why I want to differentiate my own purse. Which is pretty silly, except that I still strongly feel that my purse is not like her old purse!
The whole thing is very silly, but it makes me think so much about how we define things in our minds and what we associate with them.
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Feel free to ask for clarification, btw, I can't think of a better way to explain it rn but I know that wasn't very clear...
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I often come across this in my job too when people speak about colour. Perception and personal cognition can differ so greatly here too, fact aside that lots of people have only one word for all shades of blue (which is just blue for them). The same with red, and some say magenta is pink and violet is pink and salmon is pink too. Some might even find a yellow isn't yellow but lime or orange, depending on the hue. Or even depending on their monitor calibration. It leads to lots of confusion, and sometimes brilliantly comical situations too. Like a few years ago when someone wanted to sell a dress on the internet. They took a photograph and posted it. Some people perceived the colour as white and gold, some as blue and black, depending both on how their monitors showed it and also by sole personal perception differences when they looked at the same screen. It always invites me to philosophize afterwards. Is a cup still blue if a person perceives it as green or simply calls it that way? And how do I apply this to writing a story, maybe even with multiple characters speaking of the same cup, some saying it's blue, some insisting it's green? And what about a colour-blind character? And so on.
And the axe mention reminds me of Aragorn's sword. It's his ancestor's sword, of course, but is it still his ancestor's sword after the Elves reforged it? Or is it a new one? Or perhaps both? :)
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But yeah, the dress thing is another aspect to it as well.
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