The Emergence of Higher Levels of Description

The paper considers what is involved in the emergence of higher levels of description. It suggests that we can think of the entities making up a particular level of description as virtual entities and argues that concept learning involves forming representations of degenerate virtual entities. These are virtual entities which play no role in the emergence of higher levels of description. The paper also explores the way in which the formation of intermediate levels of description allows an agent to trade oo computational costs against representational costs.