Jeff Hawkins on reality

I shall have more to say about Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence in later posts, but for now I wanted to share his refreshingly hylomorphic views on reality (pp. 63-64):

All our knowledge of the world is a model…This is not to say that the people or objects aren’t really there. They are really there.

Can we trust that the world is as it seems? Yes. The world really does exist in an absolute form very close to how we perceive it. However, our brains can’t know about the absolute world directly.

Jeff is right on target. Personally, though, I wouldn’t use the phraseology “very close”, preferring instead something like “substantially well-mapped”.

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