How do we learn about the world beyond the skin (i.e., the third dimension)? "Every motion of your body, head, or eye makes drastic changes to the image in your eye. How can we extract any useful information when everything changes so rapidly? ... It appears that our brains have evolved with special mechanisms that help us compensate for motions of the body, head, and eye." This makes it easier for agencies to learn from visual information. But we still don't understand how this is done:
"Perhaps we start by doing many small experiments that lead to our first, crude maps of the skin. Next we might start to correlate these with the motions of our eyes and limbs; two different actions that lead to similar senations are likely to have passed through the same locations in space. A critical step would be developing some agents that `represent' a few `places' outside the skin. Once those places are established (the first ones might be near the infant's face), one could prceed to another stage: the assembly of an agency that represents a network of relationships, trajectories, and directions between those places".
(NB: The basic idea here is that the notion of 3D space is bootstrapped. Is there any evidence for this view in the developmental literature? Also, here we get explicit notion that agents `represent'. But why does Minsky put scare quotes around this? Do agents represent, or not?)
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