Abstract

The conventional approach to interpreting biological vision systems and experimenting with computer vision systems has been overwhelmingly dominated by a representational view of information. Even more recent connectionist approaches, though embodying a substantial change in viewpoint, have only involved a change of the type of representation, to one of a distributed nature. An alternative view is the notion of information as being constructed and codependent rather than instructional and referential. This is an interpretation based on the more embracing viewpoint of the complementary causal descriptions and symbolic descriptions playing clearly defined interrelated and dual roles, rather than mutually exclusive, or even muddled roles. This paper examines this radical change in perspective and compares it with a causality framework and with a position on the nature of perception which is based on the idea of universals.