Recognizing things

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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?

• 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.

Comments

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Yeah, apparently there are lots of versions!

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.