I’m not sure if these are examples of the thing you’re talking about or something else, but:
Consider a missile that’s guided by GPS until it reaches its rough target location, then uses sensors to locate the target precisely. (Though arguably this is simply “SIM followed by SIT”.)
Or consider when I do something similar myself. I use the map on my phone screen to guide me to roughly where I want to be, and then I use my eyes to guide me to exactly where I want to be. And I don’t just switch from SIM to SIT; I keep checking with both, in case e.g. I miss it and go too far.
Here’s what I think is the right way to understand what’s going on in the phone case. Let’s say you’re looking for an ice cream stand in a park.
Your brain takes input from the phone and your eyeballs. It synthesizes them, along with memories and other sense data, into a prediction about where you should walk and what you should look at in order to find the ice cream stand. Based on that mental synthesis, it sends outputs to your body, causing you to walk/read/look around.
In this conception, there’s ultimately only “search in map,” where the map is in your brain. “Search in territory” is just a fancy label we give to a certain subset of sense impressions that aren’t focusing on what we conventionally call a “map.”
I think that John is interested here in this distinction from a more practical, engineering perspective. When is it efficient for some instrumental goal to create or consult what we’d conventionally call a “map?” Here, the important thing seems to be the distinction between accumulating and storing information in a legible format, versus acquiring data anew each time.
I’m just pointing out that ultimately, there has to be some abstract synthesis of signals. The idea of transducing signals from one form into another might be more helpful for understanding this side of things. Here, the important thing is tracing the transduction of information from one processing mechanism to another.
To me, these seem importantly different, so I’m advocating that they be split apart rather than lumped together.
I’m not sure if these are examples of the thing you’re talking about or something else, but:
Consider a missile that’s guided by GPS until it reaches its rough target location, then uses sensors to locate the target precisely. (Though arguably this is simply “SIM followed by SIT”.)
Or consider when I do something similar myself. I use the map on my phone screen to guide me to roughly where I want to be, and then I use my eyes to guide me to exactly where I want to be. And I don’t just switch from SIM to SIT; I keep checking with both, in case e.g. I miss it and go too far.
Those are nice examples/test cases!
Here’s what I think is the right way to understand what’s going on in the phone case. Let’s say you’re looking for an ice cream stand in a park.
Your brain takes input from the phone and your eyeballs. It synthesizes them, along with memories and other sense data, into a prediction about where you should walk and what you should look at in order to find the ice cream stand. Based on that mental synthesis, it sends outputs to your body, causing you to walk/read/look around.
In this conception, there’s ultimately only “search in map,” where the map is in your brain. “Search in territory” is just a fancy label we give to a certain subset of sense impressions that aren’t focusing on what we conventionally call a “map.”
I think that John is interested here in this distinction from a more practical, engineering perspective. When is it efficient for some instrumental goal to create or consult what we’d conventionally call a “map?” Here, the important thing seems to be the distinction between accumulating and storing information in a legible format, versus acquiring data anew each time.
I’m just pointing out that ultimately, there has to be some abstract synthesis of signals. The idea of transducing signals from one form into another might be more helpful for understanding this side of things. Here, the important thing is tracing the transduction of information from one processing mechanism to another.
To me, these seem importantly different, so I’m advocating that they be split apart rather than lumped together.