Thursday, October 15, 2020
Possible but unlikely
Not gonna call this AI point-missing, though it's sort of halfway there.
Have you ever looked desperately for something—your passport perhaps—and then found, half an hour later, that it was right in front of you all the time? Inconspicuous but not really invisible? “Hiding in plain sight,” as the saying goes. It happens to everyone. We wonder why we didn’t find it before.Now some researchers think they've found the reason, in an occasional form of resonance in the brain. Seems unlikely. It might be possible to prove the correlation by experiment, but that still wouldn't explain why these particular resonances occur. It just kicks the purpose back by a notch. The pattern is well known and well described. It's not just happening to find the hiding object. In this pattern you find the object when you're looking for something else. The pattern was called McGumper's Law. Poe mentioned it in the Imp of the Perverse. It was also discussed in some popular books about Zen, though I don't think it's really the basis of Zen. Think of it as separate modes, separate mental spaces. You've been looking for the passport for an hour, staying in the same focus, with the same parts of the brain activated. Then you forget about it and later start looking for your keys. You're now comparing reality with a different template, one that has keys in the foreground. The passport's interaction with the search template is different, so sometimes (not always!) it has a better chance of being seen.
Labels: defensible spaces
¶ 5:03 AM
