Rough Beast

Rough Beast
Grifo Mecanico - Diego Mazzeo

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Remembering My Future

"The core function of memory is to imagine the future. Memory is not designed to perfectly replay past events; it is to flexibly construct future scenarios." -- Tali Sharot, The Optimism Bias, Time, June 6, 2011

When I hold a spoon in my hand I do not usually expect that it will turn into a fork while I hold it before my eyes. I can surely imagine the case where this might happen - I just did by stringing together a useful string of letters from a set of 96 symbols rank ordered in the ASCII code for English type. That is  ['0','1','2', ... ,'9'] U ['a','b','c',...'z','A','B','C',...,'Z'] U ['period', 'comma', ... ,'bang'] or the union of the sets 26 lower-case letters, the 26 upper-case letters, the 31 punctuation marks and the 10 numerals.

We both participated in a multiplexing between minds a shared meaning for my statement about spoons turning into forks. According to Steven Pinker, we all share minds in evolved primate brains which depend on conceptual semantics as a model for human thought which he calls the stuff of thought. From this construal, minds share through spoken or written language the common ground for the shared experience of the cosmic environment. Conceptual semantics rides on top of an admixture of mechanisms evolved over time to improve our guesses about what happens next.

The most common model for minds since Aristotle subdivided the mind include experience, memory and computational means for cognition. As the quote above indicates, we use memory primarily to make improved guesses over time about what happens next. So where does the mind come together in our brains to bootstrap memory, experience and cognition (computation)?

We are not born with innate concepts like written language in the same way that we experience spoken language. Most mammals, birds (a type of dinosaur) and insects have innate communication means. Birds sing and ants produce pheromones to communicate. But what is going on in the minds of the multiple hearers and readers?

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