Caledonian: “It is much, much more elegant—and more compatible with what we know about cognition—to hold that the complex systems are built out of smaller, simpler systems over which the complex has no control.”
The brain has feedback loops to even the earliest processing stages. Thus, I might choose to look for a lost contact lens. With that goal in mind, my unconscious visual processing systems will be primed to recognize signals that could be a contact lens. (The feedback loops can be observed in the neural tissue. There are cognitive science experiments that demonstrate that high level conscious decisions can affect neural processing in the earlier stages.)
The conscious mind may be a dim reflection of the top level computation that makes choices but it does reflect some of the processing that occurs. The conscious mind is aware of possible future outcomes and potential paths to preferred outcomes. The conscious mind isn’t aware of the total brain mechanism that makes decisions, but it is aware of important pieces of that computation.
Caledonian: “It is much, much more elegant—and more compatible with what we know about cognition—to hold that the complex systems are built out of smaller, simpler systems over which the complex has no control.”
The brain has feedback loops to even the earliest processing stages. Thus, I might choose to look for a lost contact lens. With that goal in mind, my unconscious visual processing systems will be primed to recognize signals that could be a contact lens. (The feedback loops can be observed in the neural tissue. There are cognitive science experiments that demonstrate that high level conscious decisions can affect neural processing in the earlier stages.)
The conscious mind may be a dim reflection of the top level computation that makes choices but it does reflect some of the processing that occurs. The conscious mind is aware of possible future outcomes and potential paths to preferred outcomes. The conscious mind isn’t aware of the total brain mechanism that makes decisions, but it is aware of important pieces of that computation.