When you look at a chair, this pattern recognition module immediately classifies it, and then brings online another module, which makes available all the relevant physical affordances, linguistic and logical implications of a chair being present in your environment. Recognizing something as a chair feels identical to recognizing something as a thing-in-which-I-can-sit. Similarly, you don’t have to puzzle out the implications of a tiger walking into the room right now. The fear response will coincide with the recognition of the tiger.
Yeah, this is similar to how I think of it. When I see something, the thoughts which are relevant for the context become available: usually naming the thing isn’t particularly necessary, so I don’t happen to consciously think of its name.
Doesn’t this imply that some submodules of your brain are thinking abstractly and logically about The Matrix completely outside of your conscious awareness? If so, then this either implies that the subconscious processing of individual submodules can be very complex and abstract without needing to share information with other submodules, or that information sharing between submodules can occur without you being consciously aware of it.
Well, we already know from the unconscious priming experiments that information-sharing between submodules can occur without conscious awareness. It could be something like, if you hadn’t been conscious of watching The Matrix, the submodules would never have gotten a strong enough signal about its contents to process it; but once the movie was once consciously processed, there’s enough of a common reference for several related submodules to “know what the other is talking about”.
Or maybe it’s all in one submodule; the fact that that submodule feels a need to make its final conclusion conscious, suggests that it can’t communicate the entirety of its thinking purely unconsciously.
Yeah, this is similar to how I think of it. When I see something, the thoughts which are relevant for the context become available: usually naming the thing isn’t particularly necessary, so I don’t happen to consciously think of its name.
Well, we already know from the unconscious priming experiments that information-sharing between submodules can occur without conscious awareness. It could be something like, if you hadn’t been conscious of watching The Matrix, the submodules would never have gotten a strong enough signal about its contents to process it; but once the movie was once consciously processed, there’s enough of a common reference for several related submodules to “know what the other is talking about”.
Or maybe it’s all in one submodule; the fact that that submodule feels a need to make its final conclusion conscious, suggests that it can’t communicate the entirety of its thinking purely unconsciously.