tangled contexts

[R.W. (Bob) Erickson]

Process and perception

 

This capacity for making high order discriminations about relationships 
between objects in our world, can be taken as the proper function of our 
cognitive competency. The attribute of intentionality, to this way of 
thinking, is best understood as "work product" of a discrete sub-module 
of our brain.

We infer agency from our observations. What is agency? Well first and 
foremost, it is that which is recognizable to the competencies in 
process, that form these judgments.

Does this sound circular? Surely it is circular in a crucial sense. All 
that we "know" comes to our attention as the work product of process in 
various competencies. Ultimately the "authority" of  these high order 
discriminations comes not from a judgment about the correlation between 
our perceptions and the state of the "objective" world, but instead from 
their immediacy. This is to say that we do not perceive and then make 
judgments, our first awareness of every "thing"  is located in the 
moment that the competent module forms some thing out of the possibilities.

These awareness's are not in the semantic domain. Our knowing of 
particular attributes precedes the semantic transform that tags and 
packages up insights, for storage and shipping. We know what we know and 
we apologize for not being able to convey this knowing more effectively.

That we are able to communicate at all, is a testament to the power of 
trial and error and the phenomenal similarity of our minds. This 
similarity is not accidental. Even as each person is an absolutely 
unique instance of humanity, what we are, is the embodiment of a 
phenomenally complex tangle of historical accomplishments that is  
fundamentally common to us all.


Creativity emerges via the capacity/ability to merge contexts

 

Biological instrumentality:

The complex objects of our knowings come to our awareness as 
circumstances demand, literally selected by their features. Apprehension 
of the world via a sophisticatedly evolved biological instrumentality is 
an entropy hack. Life is the opportunistic bloom of a viral exploitation 
of regularity in the universe.

 

In the beginning there was sequence, and it begat pattern and context 
space. Within every context space there is a tree of combinatorial 
consequences some leaves of which are potentially lucky. Blind evolution 
isn't trial and error testing of mistakes (mutations), it is the random 
testing of legal combinations

 

So who set up the game, where did the rules come from, and the design 
language?

 

The dynamic core of our consciousness consists of transient alignments 
of Feature Value - Action loops that compete for selection in a 
flicker-dance-sort of associations and sensory stimuli.

 

 

 

Perception is a physics hack. Timing is everything. Three dimensionality 
is accessible to us via  a cross mapping within the temporal manifold. 
Propagation of coherent correlations between map-mapped sheets of 
neurons act as a massively parallel delay line with multiple taps. 
Because both spatial and temporal coherence is preserved, the network 
sorts up the objects of perception and tracks them real time. Reality is 
best fit. Misperceptions happen, but its better than being blind.

 

Our competency at this is not postulated, it is stipulated that the high 
order discriminations we perceive as qualia are exactly as amazing as 
the incredible complexity of the neurological stack that gives us them.

Intentionality is an emergent design goal in secondary consciousness.

(before getting upset about intentional language, remember that it works 
because reality fits.)

 

 

Phenomenal transform is a semantic label for a context shift. If you 
insist on thinking of it as a happening, what's happening is that we 
find ourselves switching lexicons when we discuss certain things. Its 
not a description of a change of state in the object, it is a handle for 
referring to a pragmatic feature of discourse about it.

 

 The important thing to realize is that this sorting out of the features 
of the objects of our perception usually is done before we are aware of 
the process, but this does not mean that the process is different for 
hard discriminations, just that they are taking longer than the ~400ms 
self context loop, that feeds a product of the net's immediate state 
back into itself. Think convolving and converging. Discrimination occurs 
opportunistically, our competencies do not require conscious attention. 
In the formation of PV Action loops each project become one of the 
factions in our interior parliament.

 

We have lots of timing to tap. Response times, flicker fusion times, 
saccades, pulse, peristalsis, menstruation. The royal road to cognitive 
illumination is the path of chronus.


--bob


"me, I'm just a lawn mower"