Object Permanence

Full Title or Meme

The concept of Object Permanence or Persistence is not naturally part of any system of knowledge. It needs to be learned by any information processor, including every human being.

Concept

• Since the beginning of Philosophy the concept of object identity has been assumed to be a part of human understanding.
• Only when Jean Piaget bean to study how babies learn has the concept of Object Permanence actually been investigated.
• Piaget showed that babies are at first confused at the "disappearance" of an adult behind a piece of paper, and surprised and delighted at the return of the adult when the paper is snatched away. What exists at first is the "event" of the "disappearance" and the event of the "reappearance".
• With the introduction of Relativity by Einstein the very existence of objects like electrons and protons has become something that can only be deduced from the events that we can measure. It should be said that this was not Einstein's original opinion, and he was not happy with view of Schrodinger and others of the Copenhagen school that thought there was no definite space/time reality to an elementary particle until it caused an event, which could be placed at a definite space/time.

Problems

• Assigning some sort of Identifier to any object when it is first seen and then reassigning that same Identifier to an object that reappears assumes the Object Permanence. But this reassignment is a challenge when we have lots of objects that would like to impersonate the original.

Solutions

• Only with the creation of Quantum Information Theory have we found a way to absolutely assure that the two sides of a communication link can be definitively identified. It does this by creating a communications channel which can be known to be securely created between two parties with no intermediaries and no snooping.
• Just as in Classical Physics, we can only approximate the identity of an object that appears on a communications link. Our task is to find some comparison using a data presentation with known data to be able to have any assurance that the object presented at one time is the same as that that was originally registered as present.