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The principle of energy conservation is widely taken to be a serious difficulty for interactionist dualism (whether property or substance). Interactionists often have therefore tried to make it satisfy energy conservation. This paper examines several such attempts, especially including E. J. Lowe's varying constants proposal, showing how they all miss their goal due to lack of engagement with the physico-mathematical roots of energy conservation physics: the first Noether theorem (that symmetries imply conservation laws), its converse (that conservation laws imply symmetries), and the locality of continuum/field physics. Thus the "conditionality response", which sees conservation as (bi)conditional upon symmetries and simply accepts energy non-conservation as an aspect of interactionist dualism, is seen to be, perhaps surprisingly, the one most in accord with contemporary physics (apart from quantum mechanics) by not conflicting with mathematical theorems basic to physics. A decent objection to interactionism should be a posteriori, based on empirically studying the brain.

This paper assumes the hypothesis that human learning is perception based, and consequently, the learning process and perceptions should not be represented and investigated independently or modeled in different simulation spaces. In order to keep the analogy between the artificial and human learning, the former is assumed here as being based on the artificial perception. Hence, instead of choosing to apply or develop a Computational Theory of (human) Perceptions, we choose to mirror the human perceptions in a numeric (computational) space as artificial perceptions and to analyze the interdependence between artificial learning and artificial perception in the same numeric space, using one of the simplest tools of Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, namely the perceptrons. As practical applications, we choose to work around two examples: Optical Character Recognition and Iris Recognition. In both cases a simple Turing test shows that artificial perceptions of the difference between two characters and between two irides are fuzzy, whereas the corresponding human perceptions are, in fact, crisp., Comment: 5th Int. Conf. on Soft Computing and Applications (Szeged, HU), 22-24 Aug 2012