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A mess is a situation for which no good ontology is apparent. “I mean, what IS all this stuff⁉️” Technical rationality isn’t good with messes, because it requires a fixed ontology. “Mere reasonableness” deals with them ad hoc. Meta-rationality constructs a new ontology.
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Messes reveal an important aspect of perception: it doesn’t deliver a “world model.” You can see in an instant that this is a mess. Figuring out what’s IN the mess would take a long time; you have to saccade (move your fovea) to each thing & look at it for a half second to see.
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To deal with a mess, you move your body and head, not just your eyes, and pick up items, or stir the contents of the box to get an impression of what sorts of junk is in there. Perception is a task-directed, whole-body activity. Image classification is not perception.
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I recently started buying spices in bulk from Amazon. You can search the mess of spice bottles on the counter, but if you are expecting caraway in a slender two-inch-tall bottle and it’s in a fat three-inch-tall one, you can look right at it and miss it.
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