Reply To: Intelligence & Abstraction vs Association/N

[fayest42]

Thanks for sharing this. I'm excited to see where else this computational metaphor idea goes. One thing I'm confused about is the little side note about the difference between vertical abstraction and horizontal association. To me, it seems like horizontal association is a necessary part of the vertical abstraction process. One way of describing abstraction (from wikipedia) is "as a compression process, mapping multiple different pieces of constituent data to a single piece of abstract data; based on similarities in the constituent data, for example, many different physical cats map to the abstraction 'CAT'." So in order to form the abstraction "cat" (vertically), you have to recognize that all the different individual cats you've seen are associated with one another (horizontally). Is that not right?