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168 9 General Intelligence in the Everyday Human World

9.4.2 Events, Processes and Causality

Specific aspects of naive physics related to temporality and causality are:

1. Distinguishing roughly-subjectively-instantaneous events from extended processes
2. Identifying beginnings, endings and crossings of processes
3. Identifying and distinguishing internal and external changes
4. Identifying and distinguishing internal and external changes relative to one's own body
5. Interrelating body-changes with changes in external entities

Notably, these aspects of naive physics involve a different processes occurring on a variety of
different time scales, intersecting in complex patterns, and involving processes inside the agent's
body, outside the agent's body, and crossing the boundary of the agent's body.

9.4.3 Stuffs, States of Matter, Qualities

Regarding the various states of matter, some important aspects of naive physics are:

1. Perceiving gaps between objects: holes, media, illusions like rainbows, mirages and holo-
grams
2. Distinguishing the manners in which different sorts of entities (e.g. smells, sounds, light) fill
space
3. Distinguishing properties such as smoothness, roughness, graininess, stickiness, runniness,
etc.
4. Distinguishing degrees of elasticity and fragility
5. Assessing separability of aggregates

9.4.4 Surfaces, Limits, Boundaries, Media

Gibson [Gib77, Gib79] has argued that naive physics is not mainly about objects but rather
mainly about surfaces. Surfaces have a variety of aspects and relationships that are important
for naive physics, such as:

1. Perceiving and reasoning about surfaces as two-sided or one-sided interfaces
2. Inference of the various ecological laws of surfaces
3. Perception of various media in the world as separated by surfaces
4. Recognition of the textures of surfaces
5. Recognition of medium/surface layout relationships such as: ground, open environment,
enclosure, detached object, attached object, hollow object, place, sheet, fissure, stick, fibre,
dihedral, etc.

As a concrete, evocative "toy" example of naive everyday knowledge about surfaces and
boundaries, consider Sloman's [Slo08a] example scenario, depicted in Figure 9.1 and drawn
largely from [SS74] (see also related discussion in [Slo08b], in which "A child can be given one

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