on 31-May-2020 (Sun)

Finally, an idea can reach the highest level and still be rendered powerless, although one can remember rejecting it (Freud names this process "repudiation.")

In one kind of block (which Freud calls "repression"), an impulse is blocked at an early stage—without the thinker becoming aware of this. However, repressed ideas can still persist—and may be expressed in elusive disguises—by changing the manner in which they're described (so that the Censors no longer can recognize them). Freud used the term sublimation for this, but we sometimes call this "rationalizing."

A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about—yet

William Calvin and George Ojeman 1994: "Modern discussions of consciousness . . . usually include such aspects of mental life as focusing your attention, things that you didn't know you knew, mental rehearsal, imagery, thinking, decision making, aware- ness, altered states of consciousness, voluntary actions, subliminal priming, the development of the concept of self in children, and the narratives we tell ourselves when awake or dreaming."

Attention: She noticed certain things rather than others.

"A very large mouse is smaller than even a very small elephant."

Just having a name for an answer can make us feel as though we actually have the answer itself

What is the animal reacting to? How does one recognize a human hand, when one never sees quite the same image twice—because each finger changes position and shape,

Which features should be remembered?When you learn a new way to tie a knot, your Ifs should not include the time when you learned it, or that rule will never apply again. Thus, if a description is too specific, it will rarely match new situations—but if a description is too general, then it will match too many of them

Whatproduced the successful reactions/To solve a hard problem, one usually needs an elaborate sequence of actions in which each step depends on what others have done. A lucky guess might produce one such step, but to find an effective sequence of them, a random search would take far too long

"We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are." —Anais Nin

it would be as useless to see how things "actually look" as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.

we can see things in imagination that are logically impossible: it starts to move with some constant speed that I cannot change, and I can't make it stop—yet, strangely, it never gets far away.

people construct synthetic perceptions inside their heads—and for this, I have coined the word umu- lus by combining stimulus and simulate. Thus in Chapter 3-8, I described how I used a simulus of Professor Challenger to disturb me enough to keep myself from falling asleep. To accomplish this, one might try to imagine all the details of such a scene; however, it might be enough merely to represent the high-level abstraction that there was a sneer on my rival's face—without constructing any other low-level details of that imagined simulus.

"panal- ogy" (for "parallel analogy")

It seems clear to me that this is why the attempts to make baby-machines have led to unimpressive results: you cannot learn things that you can't represent.