I totally agree. Perceived differences in kind here are largely due to the different methods we use to think about these things.
For the triangle, everybody knows what a triangle is, we don’t even need to use conscious thought to recognize them. But for the key, I can’t quite keep the entire shape in my memory at once, if I want to know if something is shaped like my front door key, I have to compare it to my existing key, or try it in the lock.
So it naively seems that triangleness is something intrinsic (because I perceive it without need for thought), while front-door-key-shape is something that requires an external reference (because I need external reference). But just because I perceive the world a certain way doesn’t mean those are particularly important distinctions. If one wanted to make a computer program recognize triangles and my front door key shape, one could just as well use the same code for both.
I totally agree. Perceived differences in kind here are largely due to the different methods we use to think about these things.
For the triangle, everybody knows what a triangle is, we don’t even need to use conscious thought to recognize them. But for the key, I can’t quite keep the entire shape in my memory at once, if I want to know if something is shaped like my front door key, I have to compare it to my existing key, or try it in the lock.
So it naively seems that triangleness is something intrinsic (because I perceive it without need for thought), while front-door-key-shape is something that requires an external reference (because I need external reference). But just because I perceive the world a certain way doesn’t mean those are particularly important distinctions. If one wanted to make a computer program recognize triangles and my front door key shape, one could just as well use the same code for both.