Yeah, as a layman on the biological side of this paper, some of the reasoning feels circular or to embed additional assumptions.
The 1.99 ~= 2.00 is one example. The authors intend to determine whether any continuous model could account for a difference in behavior, but their example only rules out models where that one cent difference is considered trivial. A continuous model might be preturbed in a way that makes those prices subjectively far apart.
The same goes for the information retrieval task. They are saying that biology can't perform a discreet classification task without having a discreet representation somewhere.
The 1.99 ~= 2.00 is one example. The authors intend to determine whether any continuous model could account for a difference in behavior, but their example only rules out models where that one cent difference is considered trivial. A continuous model might be preturbed in a way that makes those prices subjectively far apart.
The same goes for the information retrieval task. They are saying that biology can't perform a discreet classification task without having a discreet representation somewhere.