Wouldn’t the insight into understanding be in the encoding, particularly how the encoder discriminates between what is necessary to ‘understand’ a particular function of a system and what is not salient? (And if I may speculate wildly, in organisms may be correlative to dopamine in the Nucleus Accumbens. Maybe.)
All mental models of the world are inherently lossy, this is the map-territory analogy in a nutshell (itself—a lossy model). The effectiveness or usefulness of a representation determines the level of ‘understanding’ this is entirely dependent on the apparent salience at the time of encoding which determines what elements are given higher fidelity in encoding, and which are more lossy. Perhaps this example will stretch the use of ‘understanding’ but consider a fairly crowded room at a conference where there is a lot of different conversations and dialogue—I see a friend gesticulating at me on the far side of the room. Once they realize I’ve made eye contact they start pointing surreptitiously to their left—so I look immediately to their left (my right) and see five different people and a strange painting on the wall—all possible candidates for what they are pointing at, perhaps it’s the entire circle of people.
Now I’m not sure at this point that the entire ‘message’ - message here being all the possible candidates for what my friend is pointing at—has been ‘encoded’ such that LDC could be used to single out (decode) the true subject. Or is it? In this example, I would have failed to reach ‘understanding’ of their pointing gesture (although I did understand their previous attempt to get my attention).
Now, suppose, my friend was pointing not to the five people or to the painting at all—but something or sixth someone further on: a distinguished colleague is drunk let’s say—but I hadn’t noticed. If I had of seen that colleague, I would have understood my friend’s pointing gesture. This goes beyond LDC because you can’t retrieve a local code of something which extends beyond the full, uncompressed message.
Does this make sense to anyone? Please guide me if I’m very mistaken.
I think Locally Decodable Code is perhaps less analogous to understanding, but probably a mental tool for thinking about how we recall and operate with something we do understand. But the ‘understanding’. For example, looking back on the conference and my friend says “hey remember when I was pointing at you”—that means I don’t need to decode the entire memory of the conference—every speech, every interaction I had but only that isolated moment. Efficient!
Wouldn’t the insight into understanding be in the encoding, particularly how the encoder discriminates between what is necessary to ‘understand’ a particular function of a system and what is not salient? (And if I may speculate wildly, in organisms may be correlative to dopamine in the Nucleus Accumbens. Maybe.)
All mental models of the world are inherently lossy, this is the map-territory analogy in a nutshell (itself—a lossy model). The effectiveness or usefulness of a representation determines the level of ‘understanding’ this is entirely dependent on the apparent salience at the time of encoding which determines what elements are given higher fidelity in encoding, and which are more lossy. Perhaps this example will stretch the use of ‘understanding’ but consider a fairly crowded room at a conference where there is a lot of different conversations and dialogue—I see a friend gesticulating at me on the far side of the room. Once they realize I’ve made eye contact they start pointing surreptitiously to their left—so I look immediately to their left (my right) and see five different people and a strange painting on the wall—all possible candidates for what they are pointing at, perhaps it’s the entire circle of people.
Now I’m not sure at this point that the entire ‘message’ - message here being all the possible candidates for what my friend is pointing at—has been ‘encoded’ such that LDC could be used to single out (decode) the true subject. Or is it?
In this example, I would have failed to reach ‘understanding’ of their pointing gesture (although I did understand their previous attempt to get my attention).
Now, suppose, my friend was pointing not to the five people or to the painting at all—but something or sixth someone further on: a distinguished colleague is drunk let’s say—but I hadn’t noticed. If I had of seen that colleague, I would have understood my friend’s pointing gesture. This goes beyond LDC because you can’t retrieve a local code of something which extends beyond the full, uncompressed message.
Does this make sense to anyone? Please guide me if I’m very mistaken.
I think Locally Decodable Code is perhaps less analogous to understanding, but probably a mental tool for thinking about how we recall and operate with something we do understand. But the ‘understanding’. For example, looking back on the conference and my friend says “hey remember when I was pointing at you”—that means I don’t need to decode the entire memory of the conference—every speech, every interaction I had but only that isolated moment. Efficient!