Perspective: A repeatable way of investigating
Perspectives are bundle of commitments about:
- What do I measure?
- What am I going to pay attention to?
- How do I weave that information together into some sort of model of what’s going on.
- What should I do next?
The extent to which your perspective gives you extra efficacy in the world is the extent to which you / your perspective / hypothesis is right.
Link to originalQuesitons about the boundary of the self are observer-dependent
It depends on your perspective: Who is the observer? What kind of questions are you asking?
“You are the same person as you were X time ago” – Humans generally don’t care whether you have same atoms / cells, but about a consistent behaviour / relationship.
Arguing about what something “really is doing” (as if there was only one true thing) is mistaken.
E.g. in biology, there are a variety of levels and sub-systems, observing each other and seeing different computations happening, each trying to squeeze out what it can.Levin: “I come from a bit of an idealist perspective … What there are in the world is perspectives. When an observer sees something, that’s not just as if, but as real as it gets. If you can find, study, manipulate, … an observer that sees something. By seeing something and making use of it, you are making it real, and that’s what it means to be real.”
I agree 100%, but I don’t get what’s supposed to be idealist here.
It sounds like textbook materialism/Engels to me.
An example how different perspectives can be utilized for computation:
Transclude of polycomputing#^89b73d
Everything is a differential battle between perspectives.
Perspectives are a choice of abstractions / categories.
References
Conversation between Josh Bongard, Atoosa Parsa, Richard Watson, and Michael Levin