Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

V\pr*^'116 HOW THE MIND WORKSwith an exact replica. When I told my roommate, he said, 'Do I knowyou?'"There is, admittedly, one feature that always distinguishes individuals:they cannot be in the same place at the same time. Perhaps the mindcould stamp every object with the time and place and constantly updatethose coordinates, allowing it to distinguish individuals with identicalproperties. But even that fails to capture our ability to keep individualsapart in our minds. Suppose an infinite white plane contains nothing buttwo identical circles. One of them slides over and superimposes itself onthe second one for a few moments, then proceeds on its way. I don'tthink anyone has trouble conceiving of the circles as distinct entitieseven in the moments in which they are in the same place at the sametime. That shows that being in a certain place at a certain time is not ourmft *^ definition of "individual."\ W /? Therh«talis not that individuals cannot be represented in neural net-\ ** works. It's easyT^Hstdedicate some units to indi\ndua\£jde1mties as indi-\^> . i viduals, independent:of v tJ»e ) individuals' pr&pertip&f^me could give eacht/}>*&* "jndividual its own unit, or give^e^iindivjddaTthe equivalent of a serialnumber, coded in a pattern of actiy^mite»«TJiemoral is that the nets*KlI j works of the mind have to be^efarted to implemenTthe-dastract logicalA notion of the individjjarfanalogous to the role played by an arbitrarily/>Q^ tab^d mempjy^ocation in a computer. What does not work is a patternY \ asso i cj»Wfrestricted to an object's observable properties, a modern\/» 0 \ v^l instantiation of the Aristotelian dictum that "there is nothing in the intel-/ lect that was not previously in the senses."X- e Is this discussion just an exercise in logic? Not at all: the concept ofindividual is the fundamental particle of our faculties of social reayk>'soning. Let me give you two real-life examples, involving those grand^VA\7V[V\ . arenas of human interaction, love and justice.^w\v k Monozygotic twins share most of their properties. Apart from thephysical resemblance, they think alike, feel alike, and act alike. Notidentically, of course, and that is a loophole through which one might tryto represent them as very narrow subclasses. But any creature representingthem as subclasses should at least tend to treat identical twins alike.The creature should transfer its opinions from one to the other, at leastprobabilistically or to some extent—remember, that is a selling point ofassociationism and its implementation in connectoplasm. For example,whatever attracts you to one twin—the way he walks, the way he talks,the way he looks, and so on—should attract you to the other. And this