Introspective Cognition

I recently had an entertaining conversation where the subject of post-cognitive mental awareness came up. One thing apparent was the plasticity of the ensemble of dispositions supporting waking life consciousness. The particular subject matter was encryption and compression of written material for rapid learning. This is the province of information theory on the face of it and conscious manipulation of proto-conscious machinery just beneath.

His Holiness, Claude Shannon - today's higher power

"Shannon entropy is a measure of the average information content one is missing when one does not know the value of the random variable." The solution proposed is a natural language programming paradigm for expanding in a minimalist format the information for the case of a string of text 'in context'. Variables are declared in a similar fashion to C language programming with types or classes. The cognitive machinery involved exploits the powerful, shared capacity of the mind called conceptual semantics. This is what Steven Pinker calls the Stuff of Thought. As a student of Chomsky's this corresponds roughly to I-Language or the internal mental process supporting human language. I-language can only be alive in the world a E-language or verbal reports on individual, subjective narratives.


According to Pinker's conceptual semantics, evolutionary processes have harnessed or recruited specific coalitions of cognitive machines - the stuff of thought - that represent in I-language common to all homo sapien phenotype  This is Chompsky's Universal Grammar with specific functions delineated by Pinker from evolutionary psychology.

His Holiness, Steven Pinker

Here is Pinker on the convenient abstraction for a model of conceptual semantics from an earlier work, The Blank Slate: The Denial of Human Nature. The ensemble of dispositions evident in the human can be thought of as outputs (behavior, emotion and speech production) from native intuitive machines. This machinery, IMHO represents an array of powerful Bayesian Inference modules. From this, the stuff of thought is produced by Bayes Networks that support the neural correlates of consciousness.


Intuitive Physics - the rules of space-time, a working model of our four dimensional framework
Intuitive Morality and Ethics - game theory means for the solution of human interaction and fair play
Intuitive Biology - easy distinction of living things or biological agents
Intuitive Economics - market exchange based on barter and trade rules promoting mutual knowledge of value.
etc.


The point of this post is that with introspective cognition - meta cognitive self awareness of the machinery of intuition - hacks and work-around of the hardware (wetware) can reinforce missing or insubstantial mental means. These improvements are identified in the same manner as Alan Turing debugged the process of thinking that underlies all current computation. Von Neumann instanced Turing's process in a computing machine model still in use today. Turing's cognitive machinery wanted to be a world wide web of computational means that pervade our experience. 


Here is one version of the roots of conceptual semantics - embodied cognition. Our minds emerge from our entire body not just our brains. As such, the navigation of social constructs in space-time matter. They matter a lot.


"Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds… [the mind] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment… Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding." - George Lakoff


The study of cognitive restructuring of cognition fascinates. The body changes the body to change the embodied mind. Plasticity WIN!