One of my favorite words, I have know for a while but it was first really obvious to me listening to Sophia Sanborns podcast on her journey to Computational Neuroscience.
It is such an elegant idea in the context of Representation Geometry, and how our mind learns to not only represent things, but represent them efficiently. This seems to be a fundamental quality of intelligence, in that learning to have a low energy model of something does an incridible job of latching onto the underlying dynamics. This is so intersectional in the world I have grown up in, coming from Information Theory and ideas that Compression is Intelligence, to even uni classes like Modeling Complex Systems and Mind Morphology.
A favorite example of mine has been that of learning Chess, where I started from a poor standpoint but was amazing among introspecting on how I learned to model a game in my mind. After a point, could replay games I had played days ago, with increasingly long sequences. This was the case not because my memory had gotten better or more focused on chess, but because I learned what were the important parts of a game to represent ( eg what piece is a threat, or a target on the board, the possibility of forks/skewers/pins, common patterns that found themselves repeating ).
Also inadvertently mentioned in Gödel, Escher, Bach in the context of Classes and Instances, which I will represent as increasing understandings of a football game.
- a class is a representation, a form like that discussed in Plato’s Phaedo.
- an instance is an active example of class, where one might imagine a specific example of a chair vs the form of all chairs
For the football game, a layman watching it might only see the class of Person on the screen, not knowing anything about the game and just knowing what is true of ALL people: they have parents, they have a name, and many qualities about them.
The next level of representation might be that of a Football Player. One knows what is true of all instances of the class of football player: they have a jersey number, they have a position they play, and they have a team they are a part of. Interestingly, any new class starts as an instance of a class one layer up. The Football player class started as an instance of the Person class.
An expert viewer would know the individual players, having a class Specifically for Ronaldo, and seeing instances of how he ranges from game to game but knowing what will always be true of his performance.