How can the brain learn about the external world? Sense is a complicated illusion. "We never actually make any direct contact with the outside world. Instead, we work with models of the world that we build inside our brains." So, how do neural signals lead to the experience of sensations?
Key point raised by Minsky is that our sensations carry their "meaning" via their relationships. "There is little that one could say about any `single touch' -- or about what any single sense-detecting agent does. However, there is much more to be said about the relations between two or more skin touches, because the closer together two skin spots are, the more frequently they'll both be touched at the same time."
(NB: This makes me think of the need for hidden units to produce sensitivity to higher-order relationships. Minsky is really arguing that sensations are not unary properties, but at the very least must be binary properties (i.e., involve relationships between two different things).)
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