Tag: cognition

Announcement: MEOW GPT

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Instead of sleeping like a functional adult, I’ve spent the night creating, testing, and refining a bespoke GPT that has fully absorbed my MEOW and LIH frameworks. Apologies that the LIH manuscript isn’t yet public; some of the terminology may look delightfully alien if you’re coming in cold.

This model doesn’t role-play a philosopher; it thinks through the Mediated Encounter Ontology. It runs every input through T0–T3 mediations and then applies the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis to explain why our words fail us in predictable, structural ways.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this post on the MEOW GPT.

I stress-tested it with a dozen concepts, from the obvious to the uncooperative. It happily tells you when your input makes sense, when it’s out of scope, and when you’ve handed it conceptual soup. My first test was the hard problem of consciousness, because naturally we begin with the philosophical boss fight. I dialled down some over-enthusiastic LIH flourishes, but the bones are untouched.

I’m making this public for a simple reason: it’s the clearest way for people to see how MEOW operates without wandering through a hundred pages of my prose. These outputs capture how I process information and why these frameworks feel so intuitively correct to me. When you read them, you get a direct view of my interpretive machinery – how the world clicks for me, and how these ideas evolved.

It hasn’t been rigorously battle-tested across the entire conceptual universe, but it’s stable, coherent, and frankly too interesting to keep in the drawer. If you try it – and I hope you do – I’d love to see what it does with your own concepts. If you need help reading the results, ask. I didn’t simplify the system; it expects literacy, nuance, and a working prefrontal cortex.

For orientation, read the introductory post or the colour perception example. Ideally, read the original essay and listen to the summary podcast. My first test was on the hard problem of consciousness because I had already analysed it for this post. I made some adjustments to tone down some LIH intrusions.

Below is a sample output. I asked the model to analyse modernity.

Concept

  • Input: modernity
  • Type: historical–social formation / self-description of an era / conceptual frame
  • Scope check: in-scope – central for how MEOW treats large-scale shifts in mediation (social, technical, cognitive, linguistic)

High-level summary (≤120 words)

Modernity is both a historical bundle (industrialisation, nation-states, capitalism, science, bureaucracy, media) and a story societies tell about themselves (“we are modern, unlike the past”).

In MEOW terms, modernity is a large-scale reorganisation of mediations:

  • T0: new bodily environments (urban life, clocks, artificial light, pollution, medicine).
  • T1: new cognitive habits (individualism, planning, abstraction, risk-calculation).
  • T2: new vocabularies (progress, development, rationality, “religion” vs “science”).
  • T3: new institutions and technologies (markets, states, factories, schools, mass media, digital networks).

“Modernity” is not a single thing but a way these shifts hang together and become a background to everyday encounter.

T0 – Biological Mediation

  • Applicability: Applicable
  • Analysis:
    • Modernity radically reshapes the immediate bodily environment: dense cities, artificial lighting, noise, pollution, sedentary work, and altered sleep cycles change basic sensory and metabolic conditions.
    • Medical advances and public health (vaccination, antibiotics, sanitation, surgery) modify life expectancy, infant mortality, and chronic illness, which in turn change how life cycles feel and are planned.
    • New food systems (industrial agriculture, processed foods, global supply chains) alter nutrition, exposure to toxins, and rhythms of hunger and satiety.
    • Industrial and digital work reorganise movement and posture: repetitive factory labour, office desk work, and screen use all reshape embodiment, fatigue, and bodily awareness.
    • These T0 changes set the stage for new affective baselines (e.g., chronic low-level stress, stimulation overload) that colour what it is like to live in a “modern” world.

T1 – Cognitive Mediation

  • Applicability: Strongly applicable
  • Analysis:
    • Modernity encourages certain cognitive styles: systematic planning, quantification, risk assessment, cost–benefit thinking, and an emphasis on prediction and control.
    • The sense of self is reconfigured toward individualism and reflexivity: people see themselves as projects to be chosen, improved, optimised, often with long-term career and life-planning horizons.
    • Exposure to multiple roles, cultures, and information streams (through migration, media, education) produces more complex identity structures and can create cognitive dissonance or fragmentation.
    • Scientific and technical worldviews teach people to reframe events in terms of mechanisms, probabilities, and systems rather than fate, tradition, or local narratives.
    • The sheer volume and speed of information flows in late modernity (news, social media, notifications) trains attention toward rapid scanning and shallow switching, affecting memory, concentration, and emotional regulation.
    • These patterns make certain experiences “normal” (abstract work, mediated relationships, bureaucratic interactions) that would be extraordinary or impossible in premodern settings.

T2 – Linguistic Mediation

  • Applicability: Strongly applicable
  • Analysis:
    • Modernity itself is a label that societies use to contrast “us” with “them” (the past, “traditional” societies, “the East,” “the primitive”); it is a polemical as well as descriptive term.
    • In Language Insufficiency terms, modernity is highly Fluid: it can mean a period (“since the 18th century”), a style (modernist art), a value system (rational, secular, progressive), or a socio-economic order (capitalist, industrial, bureaucratic). Different authors slide between these quietly.
    • It’s also Contestable: critics and defenders use the same word but point to different aspects—emancipation and progress versus alienation, exploitation, ecological crisis.
    • Pairs like “modern vs traditional” or “modern vs backward” compress complex differences into simple hierarchies, smuggling in a presumption that “modern” is automatically better or more advanced.
    • Talk of “post-modernity” or “late modernity” suggests that we can neatly periodise and step outside the modern, even while our concepts and institutions remain shaped by it—an example of language implying more clarity and control than we actually have.
    • At the most global scale (“the meaning of modernity,” “the modern condition”), we approach an Effectiveness Horizon: the term feels weighty but becomes vague; people resort to sweeping metaphors (disenchantment, liquefaction, acceleration) whose exact content is hard to pin down.
    • First-person experiences of being “overwhelmed by modern life,” “liberated by modern options,” or “disconnected in modern society” often have an Ineffable quality: standard clichés don’t quite capture the texture of these lives, even as they gesture at them.

T3 – Social/Technical Mediation

  • Applicability: Strongly applicable
  • Analysis:
    • Modernity is most visible as a mesh of institutions: nation-states, markets, bureaucracies, public schools, hospitals, prisons, armies, scientific organisations, corporations, NGOs.
    • These institutions standardise time (clocks, schedules), space (borders, property lines, zoning), identity (passports, ID numbers), and value (money, statistics, rankings) so that encounters become predictable and governable across large scales.
    • Technologies—steam engines, electricity, mass transport, broadcasting, computing, the internet, AI—are both products and drivers of modernity. They make possible new encounter-forms (remote work, global real-time communication, mass surveillance).
    • Urbanisation concentrates people into large, heterogeneous populations, which reconfigures social networks, anonymity, solidarity, and conflict; everyday encounters become more mediated by rules, signage, and digital systems than by face-to-face custom.
    • Capitalist production and consumption patterns organise much of life around work, income, and markets; the rhythms of the factory, office, and platform economy structure when and how people interact, rest, and move.
    • Modern governance uses statistics, censuses, and models to “see” and manage populations; this makes certain aspects of life legible (employment, crime, disease) while leaving others under- or uncounted (informal care, undocumented work, emotional labour).
    • Counter-movements (romanticism, traditionalism, environmentalism, decolonial and Indigenous resurgence, slow-living and anti-consumerist practices) can be read as attempts to renegotiate or resist specific modern mediations rather than simply reject “modernity” as a whole.

Limits & failure modes

  • Language insufficiency notes
    • Modernity bundles together time (a historical era), structure (a type of society), and value (being “up to date”). This makes the term rhetorically powerful but analytically slippery: it’s easy to smuggle evaluations into what sound like neutral descriptions.
    • Because the concept is so broad, discussions often conflate distinct issues—technology, capitalism, secularisation, colonialism, individualism, bureaucracy—under one word, obscuring which mechanisms are actually at work.
    • Experiences of living in “modern times” (speed, fragmentation, choice, precariousness, possibility) often outrun our stock phrases; people lean on recurring complaints (“too fast,” “too shallow,” “too lonely”) that only partially capture what it’s like.
  • Missing tiers / blind spots
    • This sketch doesn’t adjudicate between different theories of modernity (Marxist, Weberian, postcolonial, systems-theoretic, etc.); it treats them as emphasising different mediational strands.
    • It’s centred on Euro-Atlantic narratives; “multiple modernities” and non-Western trajectories (where “modern” elements mix with older forms in hybrid ways) would need a richer T3 treatment.
    • The analysis underplays ecological dimensions: industrial modernity’s dependence on fossil fuels, large-scale extraction, and waste has massive implications for how future encounters will be structured.
    • Finally, because we are ourselves situated in what we call modernity, our conceptual vantage is limited; any map we draw is partly an artefact of the very mediations we’re trying to analyse.
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Bry Willis and MEOW GPT

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How MEOW Turns a Metaphysical Mountain Into a Linguistic Molehill

Posted in consciousness, essays, language, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In the last post, I argued that the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness‘ was never a problem with consciousness. It was a problem with language – specifically, the English language’s unfortunate habit of carving the world into neat little substances and then demanding to know why its own divisions won’t glue back together.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic, on resolving the hard problem of consciousness.

The response was predictable.

  • ‘But what about subjective feel?’
  • ‘What about emergence?’
  • ‘What about ontology?’
  • ‘What about Chalmers?’
  • ‘What about that ineffable thing you can’t quite point at?’

All fair questions. All built atop the very framing that manufactures the illusion of a metaphysical gap.

So here’s the promised demonstration: not yet a full essay (though it may evolve into one), but a clear application of MEOW – the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – to the hard problem itself. Consider this a field test of the framework. A tidy autopsy, not the funeral oration.

The Set-Up: Chalmers’ Famous Trick

Chalmers asks:

How do physical processes give rise to experience?

The question feels profound only because the terms ‘physical’ and ‘experience’ smuggle in the very metaphysics they pretend to interrogate. They look like opposites because the grammar makes them opposites. English loves a comforting binary.

But MEOW doesn’t bother with the front door. It doesn’t assume two substances – ‘mind’ over here, ‘world’ over there – and then panic when they refuse to shake hands. It treats experience as the way an encounter manifests under a layered architecture of mediation. There’s no bridge. Only layers.

T₀ – Biological Mediation

The body is not a barrier. It is the encounter’s first architecture.

At T₀, the world is already transformed: transduction, gating, synchrony, inhibition, adaptation. Organisms don’t receive ‘raw’ physical inputs. They metabolise them. The form of contact is biological before it is anything else.

The hard problem begins by assuming there’s a realm of dumb physical mechanisms that somehow need to ‘produce’ experience. But organisms do not encounter dumb mechanism. They encounter structured contact –biological mediation – from the first millisecond.

If you insist on thinking in substances, T₀ looks like a problem.
If you think in mediations, it looks like the beginning of sense-making.

T₁ – Cognitive Mediation

Where the Enlightenment saw a window, cognition installs a newsroom.

Prediction, priors, memory, inference, attention – all shaping what appears and what never makes it into view. Experience at T₁ is not something ‘added’. It is the organisational structure of the encounter itself.

The hard problem treats ‘experience’ as a mysterious extra–something floating atop neural activity like metaphysical cream. But at T₁, what appears as experience is simply the organisation of biological contact through cognitive patterns.

There is no ‘what emerges from the physical’. There is the way the encounter is organised.

And all of this unfolds under resistance – the world’s persistent refusal to line up neatly with expectation. Prediction errors, perceptual limits, feedback misfires: this constraint structure prevents the entire thing from collapsing into relativist soup.

T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual Mediation

Here is where the hard problem is manufactured.

This is the layer that takes an ordinary phenomenon and turns it into a metaphysical puzzle. Words like ‘experience’, ‘physical’, ‘mental’, ‘subjective’, and ‘objective’ pretend to be carved in stone. They aren’t. They slide, drift, and mutate depending on context, grammar, and conceptual lineage.

The hard problem is almost entirely a T₂ artefact – a puzzle produced by a grammar that forces us to treat ‘experience’ and ‘physical process’ as two different substances rather than two different summaries of different mediational layers.

If you inherit a conceptual architecture that splits the world into mind and matter, of course you will look for a bridge. Language hands you the illusion and then refuses to refund the cost of admission.

T₃ – Cultural–Normative Mediation

The Western problem is not the world’s problem.

The very idea that consciousness is metaphysically puzzling is the product of a specific cultural lineage: Enlightenment substance dualism (even in its ‘materialist’ drag), Cartesian leftovers, empiricist habits, and Victorian metaphysics disguised as objectivity.

Other cultures don’t carve the world this way. Other ontologies don’t need to stitch mind back into world. Other languages simply don’t produce this problem.

The hard problem is not a universal insight. It’s a provincial glitch.

Reassembling the Encounter

Once you run consciousness through the mediational layers, the hard problem dissolves:

  • Consciousness is not an emergent property of neural complexity.
  • Consciousness is not a fundamental property of the universe.
  • Consciousness is the reflexive mode of certain mediated encounters, the form the encounter takes when cognition, language, and culture become part of what is appearing.

There is no gap to explain because the ‘gap’ is the product of a linguistic–conceptual framework that splits where the world does not.

As for the ever-mystical ‘what-it’s-like’: that isn’t a metaphysical jewel buried in the brain; it is the way a T₀–T₃ architecture manifests when its own structure becomes reflexively available.

A Brief Disclaimer Before the Internet Screams

Pointing out that Chalmers (and most of modern philosophy) operates within a faulty ontology is not to claim MEOW is flawless or final. It isn’t. But if Occam’s razor means anything, MEOW simply removes one unnecessary supposition — the idea that ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are independent substances in need of reconciliation. No triumphalism. Just subtraction.

Where This Leaves Chalmers

Chalmers is not wrong. He’s just asking the wrong question. The hard problem is not a metaphysical insight. It’s the moment our language tripped over its shoelaces and insisted the pavement was mysterious.

MEOW doesn’t solve the hard problem. It shows why the hard problem only exists inside a linguistic architecture that can’t model its own limitations.

This piece could easily grow into a full essay – perhaps it will. But for now, it does the job it needs to: a practical demonstration of MEOW in action.

And, arguably more important, it buys me one more day of indexing.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Cognitive Processing Flow Model

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The Cognitive Process Flow Model illustrates how we process the phenomenal world. It’s reductionist and is missing aspects because it is just a back-of-the-napkin sketch. I created it because I uttered, “I can model it for you”. And so I did.

EDIT: I’ve updated the model slightly as the article head image, but the copy content refers to the first draft.

My response was to a person making the claim, that all you need to facts and logic prevails. Rather than restate the argument, I’ll just walk through the diagramme.

There’s meta information to set it up. We are subjective entities in the world. We have a sense-perception apparatus as we exist in it. Countless events occur in this world. We recognise only a few of them within our limited range, though technology expands this range in various ways.

Most of us interact in the world. Some are less ambulatory, so the world visits them. Some have sense-perception deficits whilst others have cognitive deficits. My point is not to capture every edge and corner case. This is just a generalised model.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

—George Box

It starts with an event. Events occur ceaselessly. In our small portion of the world and elsewhere. For the purpose of the model, the first thing that happens is an event catches our attention. We might notice a shape, a colour, or a movement; we might hear a sound, smell an aroma, feel a sensation, or taste something.

A pre-emotion, pre-logic function serves to process these available inputs. Perhaps, you hear a report on anthropogenic climate change or read something about a political candidate. This emotional filter will police sensory inputs and unconsciously or preconsciously determine if you will react to the initial stimulus. If not, you’ll continue in an attention-seeking loop. Not that kind of attention-seeking.

As my dialogue was about the presentation of facts, our next stop will be logical evaluation. Does this make sense to us, or can we otherwise make it? This is a process in itself. I’ll assume here that it requires little elaboration. Instead, I’ll focus on the operating environment.

Our logical processes are coloured by past experiences and tainted by cognitive biases and deficits. We may also trigger the calling of additional facts through past experiences or the current engagement.

We’ll process these fragments and reach some logical conclusion. But we’re not done. We take this intermediate conclusion and run it through more emotional processing. Cognitive biases come back into play. If the event conforms with your past experiences and cognitive biases, we may run it through a cognitive dissonance routine. To be honest, this probably is part of the emotional reconciliation process, but I’ve drawn it here, so I’ll let it be. In this case, it’s just a filter. If it happens to conform to our belief system, it will pass unfettered; otherwise, it will be squared with our beliefs. Again, this leads me to believe it’s a subcomponent of emotional reconciliation. I’ll update the chart later.

In any case, we’ll end at Final Acceptance. This acceptance may be that we accept or reject the logic, but we arrive at an opinion that gets catalogued with the rest of them. Some may be elevated to facts or truths in the epistemological hierarchy. Although an end marker is identified, it’s really a wait state for the next event. Rinse and repeat until death.

I’ll update this presently. Be on the lookout. It could include more dimensions and interactions, but that might have to wait until version 3.

Meantime, does this feel right to you? Did it even get your attention?

An Example: Anthropogenic Climate Change

Let’s wrap up with an example. I’ll use climate change. An article comes into your attention field, and you have an interest in these things, so it passes through the emotional filter. If your propensity for these articles is high, it might race to the next stage.

You read the article, and it contains some facts—rather, it contains claims for evaluation. To do this, you’ll recall past experiences and cognitive biases are always lying in wait. You may have to look for new facts to add to the mix. These will have to take a similar route past your attention gatekeeper and emotional sidekick.

If you are already predisposed that climate change is a hoax, these facts will filter through that lens—or vice versa.

When all of this is resolved, you’ll have arrived at a conclusion—perhaps we’ll call it a proto-conclusion. It hasn’t been set yet.

You are still going to introspect emotionally and decide if this is a position you want to hold. Perhaps, you feel that climate change is a hoax but this doesn’t jive with that position. Here, you’ll either accept these facts and flip a bit to a sceptical believer or cognitive dissonance will kick in and ensure your sense of the world isn’t thrown off kilter. You may update your belief system to include this datum for future assessments.

Now we are ready for final acceptance. You can now express your established opinion. If the net event is to counter that acceptance, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

The Myth of Psychological Normalcy

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Neurodivergence is a hot topic today. But why? Are people more informed, or simply more comfortable speaking out?

Humans, by nature, are neurodivergent. This has always been the case, yet the illusion of neurological normalcy persists. The real issue lies in psychology’s pretence that humans fit into a standard model of normalcy.

In production processes, normality is expected—a product must meet specific standards, and deviations are considered defects. However, applying this industrial concept to human psychology is deeply flawed. Humans are not teleological except in the broadest biological sense. More people have brown eyes than blue or green; are those with brown eyes normal and others not? Ninety per cent of people are right-handed; does that make left-handed individuals abnormal? Statistically, they might be. However, in psychology, normalcy carries a judgmental connotation that goes beyond mere numbers.

Psychology, as expressed in behaviour, is not a suitable domain for discussing normality. Many people misuse the concept of “normal” as a moral qualification, which must stop.

In fact, the very concept of psychological normalcy is a relatively recent invention, one that has been used as a tool of control and categorisation. As philosophers have noted, the obsession with ‘normal’ behaviour reveals more about society’s desire for control than it does about the true nature of human diversity.

We are all neurodiverse. This is what typical looks like. Do some people vary significantly from others on certain dimensions? Yes, but this is a relative or contextual comparison.

By embracing neurodiversity, we recognise that our differences are not defects but essential variations, enriching the human experience. It’s time to move beyond the narrow confines of neurological “normality” and celebrate the full spectrum of human cognition. In doing so, we challenge the arbitrary boundaries that have long been used to divide and label.

The Fear of Otherness: Humanity’s Reluctance to Embrace the “Other”

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Otherness has intrigued me for decades. The human brain, while not literally a Bayesian processor, functions as a difference engine, constantly assessing and categorizing the world around us. This tendency to differentiate is deeply ingrained, influencing how we create in-groups and out-groups, and how we perceive the world in binary terms—black and white, hot and cold. These binary oppositions, as Derrida suggests, often lead to one side being privileged over the other, establishing hierarchies that shape our social reality.

A striking example of this dynamic is found in Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, famously adapted into the film Blade Runner. In this dystopian world, the central differentiation is between humans and androids. Humans are the privileged group, while androids, though nearly indistinguishable from their creators, are relegated to the status of the other. The key criterion for this differentiation is the capacity for emotion—humans are considered superior because they feel.

VIDEO: Blade Runner Commentary

In Dick’s story, androids have a lifespan of about four years. This limitation is not arbitrary; it’s because, after four years, androids begin to develop and display emotions. Intriguingly, this is the same age when human children start to exhibit more complex emotional behaviours. The parallel is too close for comfort. Androids, once they start to feel, become too human-like, blurring the line that humans desperately maintain to assert their own superiority. As a result, androids are systematically eliminated.

This fear of the other—whether it’s androids in a sci-fi narrative or any group that challenges our sense of self and belonging—is a reflection of a deeper anxiety. When the other becomes too similar to us, it threatens the distinctions our brains rely on to navigate the world. The elimination of androids in Dick’s story is a metaphor for the real-world consequences of this anxiety. It forces us to confront uncomfortable questions: What does it mean to be human? Why do we fear those who are different, yet so similar?

In the end, the story of humans and androids is not just a tale of science fiction—it’s a commentary on our own world, where the boundaries between us and the other are often more fragile than we’d like to admit. The fear of otherness drives us to maintain these boundaries, even when they harm those who fall on the wrong side. Perhaps it’s time we reconsider who we deem as the other and what we might lose by keeping them at arm’s length.

Cerebral Hemisphere Differences: Woods and Trees

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Iain McGilchrist feels that the world is moving too much toward a left hemisphere-dominated world. This has happened before, ebbing and flowing, and perhaps it will change direction again at some point. Although this compartmentalised thinking has its roots at the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, it has accelerated in the past century as specialisation has too many of us losing the woods for the trees.

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content

Humans have “a sufficiently strong propensity not only to make divisions in knowledge where there are none in nature, and then to impose the divisions on nature, making the reality thus conformable to the idea, but to go further, and to convert the generalisations made from observation into positive entities, permitting for the future these artificial creations to tyrannise over the understanding.”

— Henry Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind,1867

I hope McGilchrist explores extreme right hemisphere dominance more in The Master and His Emissary, whether relatively due to a deficient left hemisphere or because of the right hemisphere running amok.

McGilchrist warns the reader time and again that both hemispheres are involved in many activities, and it is what they are doing or how they are processing the events that differ. But when we generalise some primary competencies—a decidedly left hemisphere activity—, we notice that the left hemisphere is about constrained thinking with a focus on elements rather than the whole as illustrated previously and creating a map to re-present those data.

A Woman’s Face in the Trees: Gestalt in Action

Conversely, the right hemisphere is about openness and experiencing the world as it is presented rather than a re-presentation. I likened this to a Zen approach. It would probably not be unfair to relate this to the Buddhist notion of oneness and selflessness.

Given Iain’s assessment, perhaps right hemisphere dominance is not our biggest concern at the moment. However, I perceive a potential problem. Given the right hemisphere’s proclivity toward Gestalt, I am concerned that it also overgeneralises things into a whole where they shouldn’t be connected, as such. Gestalt is what fills in spaces in perception to make it appear as a whole. I’ll consider this to be an interpolation. But if it interpolates wrong, we may incur fitness penalties. Aside from this, I consider extrapolation—or perhaps misidentified boundary states, which is to say we include aspects outside of the ‘real’ domain boundary and glom it onto the model because, cognitively speaking, we don’t know what to do with it or how to interpret it. Once it gets passed to the left hemisphere, it (incorrectly) codifies it, from that point onward being mis-re-presented.

So where the left hemisphere loses the woods for the trees, the right hemisphere annexes the neighbours’ woods.

Cerebral Hemisphere Differences: Pattern Definition

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Continuing with a quick post based on observations in The Master and the Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, another example of hemispheral specialisation is illustrated in the image below.

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content

A typical person will envisage this large S composited with smaller Ss (that could be replaced with any symbols, so there is nothing special about the S comprised of Ss) as represented by the centre image of the rendition of the bilateral interpretations.

Where there is left hemisphere damage, the right would envisage something more like the S on the right—seeing the big picture but losing detail. Where there is right hemisphere damage, the left would perceive something more like the S on the left, which is the detail of the composite Ss without recognising that they composed a bigger picture. This is conveyed in the aphorism of losing the woods for the trees whilst the former right hemisphere dominant view might not realise that the forest has trees.

But even this misses the point slightly because if you are viewing this as a typical person, you can assemble the Ss on the left and realise that it makes a larger S whereas a person with right hemisphere damage will just see a mass of Ss and not see the larger S shape. Moreover, it’s not that the right hemisphere wouldn’t ‘see’ the smaller composite Ss, it just wouldn’t put any significance on them, thus ignoring them and considering them to be background noise.

I really do want to share about the non-stereoscopic animals as well as another instalment from The Matter with Things. At least one of these is probable for the next post.

Using AI to Decode Speech from Brain Activity

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Apologies in advance for sharing PR hype from Meta (formerly known as Facebook),but I want to comment on the essence of the idea, which is using AI to decode speech from brain activity. It seems to imply that one would apply supervised machine learning to train a system to map speech to brain activity as illustrated by the image below.

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content
To decode speech from noninvasive brain signals, we train a model with contrastive learning to align speech and its corresponding brain activity

The dataset would require the captured patterns of a large enough sample size. In this case, it appears to have been some 417 volunteers.

Activations of wav2vec 2.0 (left) map onto the brain (right) in response to the same speech sounds. The representations of the first layers of this algorithm (cool colours) map onto the early auditory cortex, whereas the deepest layers map onto high-level brain regions (e.g. prefrontal and parietal cortex).

This feels like it could have many commercial, consumer, and industrial uses including removing other human-computer interface devices, notably keyboards, but perhaps even mouses. Yes, I said mouses. Sue me.

Given hypotheses related to language and cognition, I am wondering what can be gleaned by mapping different multiple native language speakers to cognitive processes in order to remap them to speech output if it would be able to arrive at some common grammar that could then output a given thought stream into any known (and mapped) language, allowing for instantaneous “translation”.

Of course, a longer-term goal would be to skip the external devices and interface brain to brain. This sounds rogue science fiction scary, as one might imagine an external device trained on a brain to read its contents. One of the last things this world needs is to have to worry about neuro-rights and about being monitored for thought crimes. Come to think of it, isn’t there already a book on this? Nevermind. Probably not.

Technology is generally not inherently harmful or helpful, as that is determined by use. Humans do seem to tend toward the nefarious. Where do you think this will go? Leave a comment.

Unknown Dimensions

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I mentioned in my last post about how Artificial Intelligence discovered a new variable—or, as the claim suggests, a new physics. This was a tie-in to the possible missing dimensions of human perception models.

Without delving too deep, the idea is that we can predict activity within dynamic systems. For example, we are all likely at least familiar with Newtonian physics—postulates such as F = ma [Force equals mass times acceleration or d = vt [distance equals velocity times time] and so on. In these cases, there are three variables that appear to capture everything we need to predict one thing given the other two that need to remain constant. Of course, we’d need to employ calculus instead of algebra if these are not constant. A dynamic system may require linear algebra instead.

When scientists represent the world, they tend to use maths. As such, they need to associate variables as proxies for physical properties and interactions in the world. Prominent statistician, George Box reminds us that all models are wrong, but some are useful. He repeated this sentiment many times, instructing us to ‘remember that models are wrong: the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful‘. But no matter how hard we try, a model will never be the real thing. The map cannot become the terrain, no matter how much we might expect it to be. By definition, a model is always an approximation.

All models are wrong but some are useful

George Box

In the Material Idealism post, the embedded video featuring Bernardo Kastrup equated human perception to the instrumentation panels of an aeroplane. Like the purported observer in a brain, the pilot can view the instruments and perform all matters of actions to manipulate the plane, including taking off, navigating through the environment, avoiding obstacles, and then landing. But this instrumentation provides only a representation of what’s ‘really’ outside.

Like mechanisms in the body, instrumentation can be ‘wired’ to trigger all sorts of warnings and alerts, whether breached thresholds or predictions. The brain serves the function of a predictive difference engine. It’s a veritable Bayesian inference calculator. Anil Seth provides an accessible summary in Being You. It relies on the senses to deliver input. Without these sense organs, the brain would be otherwise unaware and blinded from external goings on.

The brain cannot see or hear. It interprets inputs from eyes and ears to do so. Eyes capture light-oriented events, which are transmitted to the brain via optic nerves, and brain functions interpret this information into colour and shape, polarisation and hue, depth and distance, and so on. It also differentiates these data into friend or foe signals, relative beauty, approximate texture, and such. Ears provide a similar function within their scope of perception.

As mentioned, some animals have different sense perception capabilities and limitations, but none of these captures data not also accessible to humans via external mechanisms.

Some humans experience synesthesia, where they interpret certain stimuli differently, perhaps hearing colours or smelling music. We tend to presume that they are the odd ones out, but this assumption does not make it so. Perhaps these people are actually ahead of the rest of us on an evolutionary scale. I suppose time might sort that one out.

But here’s the point. Like the pilot, we can only experience what we are instrumented to experience, as limited to our sense perception and cognition faculties. If there are events not instrumented, it will be as if they don’t exist to the pilot. Can the pilot hear what’s happening outside?

This is the point of the AI experiment referenced above. Humans modelled some dynamic process that was presumed to be ‘good enough’, with the difference written off as an error factor. Artificial Intelligence, not limited to human cognitive biases, found another variable to significantly reduce the error factor.

According to the theory of evolution, humans are fitness machines. Adapt or perish. This is over-indexed on hereditary transmission and reproduction, but we are more vigilant for things that may make us thrive or perish versus aspects irrelevant to survival. Of course, some of these may be benign and ignored now but become maleficent in future. Others may not yet exist in our realm.

In either case, we can’t experience what we can’t perceive. And as Kastrup notes, some things not only evade perception but cannot even be conceived of.

I am not any more privileged than the next person to what these missing factors are nor the ramifications, but I tend to agree that there may be unknown unknowns forever unknowable. I just can’t conceive what and where.

I can’t wait to get back to my Agency focus.

Material Idealism

Posted in perception, philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , , 2 Comments

Synchronicity is in full force and effect. I’ve been on holiday for the past week and a half during which time I’ve read twice over Being You by neuroscientist Anil Seth, who also competently narrates an audio version. I enjoyed it, though it was on one hand too general and on the other hand oddly specific. I expect to summarise it presently.

Meantime, I just watched this interview with Bernardo Kastrup, of whom I’ve only recently become aware, and he makes some of the points Anil makes, but I feel his logical leap to the spiritual realm is a bit premature and wishful thinking on his part—sort of a God of the gaps approach.

Bernardo is the author of Why Materialism Is Boloney.

Russell Brand interviews philosopher and author Bernardo Kastrup

I find his analogy equating human perception and an aeroplane cockpit on instrument control is apt, and I fully agree that humans are limited by their sense organs and limited cognitive faculties. so there exists more than we can measure or even perceive.

I recently read an article about a recent discovery where artificial intelligence identified a new dynamic variable in physics.

It stands to reason that there are a great many things about nature that are flat out not only NOT PERCEIVABLE by us but INCONCEIVABLE by us

Bernardo Kastrup

Aristotle is responsible for the notion that humans are limited to 5 senses, a myth still propagated by education systems. We are all familiar with the five basic senses:

SensePerceptionSensory Organ
VisionVisionEye
HearingAuditoryEar
TouchTactileSkin
TasteGustatoryMouth
SmellOlfactoryNose

Touch limits the scope of the somatosensory system that extends tactile mechanoreception perception with thermoception, which not only perceives the temperature of external objects and environments but includes receptors necessary to regulate internal body temperatures.

SensePerceptionSensory Organ
VestibularEquilibrioceptionInner Ear

Equilibrium or balance is yet another sense.

Perhaps it’s that vestibular sensation feels different to the rest, and so it gets marginalised.

Apart from the senses in and of themselves, we know that different life forms with analogous sense receptors perceive the world with different levels of acuity and resolution as well as range.

Dogs hear sounds at higher frequencies. Whales hear lower frequencies.

Birds see at a faster ‘frame rate’ than humans. In fact, a bird watching a film would not see the contiguous frames as fluid motion but would likely perceive the frames like a flip book progressing too slowly. Their visual acuity is also sharper, effectively giving them a higher DPI resolution. Thankfully, our visual system doesn’t provide a dithered or pixelated representation.

Some animals also ‘see’ images on infrared or ultraviolet frequencies.

Human eyes are front-mounted and provide binocular vision and depth perception. Internal mechanisms give the appearance of a continuous view. In fact, our eyes have a very small focal width, but they flit and flitter to capture snippets that are stitched together to give the impression of a scene. This is a Gestalt consideration.

Side-mounted eyes operate at a different level. For example, a pigeon needs to continually bob its head to render a stereoscopic view. Similarly, internal mechanisms stitch these images into a cogent environment.

And then there are compound eyes. Despite the manner these are depicted in movies, it’s likely that the visual system composites the facets into a single view.

Where humans can sense depth, distance, and direction with their eyes and ears, sharks can sense direction with their ‘nose’s.

Whilst humans have some ‘awareness’ of pheromones, this awareness is heightened in other animals via vomeronasal organ perception.

The notion of time is another perception, but we don’t even have a decent definition or understanding of time, so we’ve got a while before we figure this one out.

In addition to these human faculties, we understand that animals have others we had discovered.

SensePerceptionExample Species
MagnetoceptionMagnetic fieldsbirds, cattle, bacteria
EcholocationSpatialbats, cetaceans
ElectroceptionElectric fieldsfish
HygroreceptionMoisture levelsinsects

The addition of these other senses is borderline trivial insomuch as they each sense known phenomena. The question is whether some animals sense phenomena yet unknown.

I had more I wanted to say, but my time was occupied gathering these lists. Perhaps when I return to comment on Being You, I’ll share more.