[Paleopsych] From Eshel--A Glitch in Genetic-centrism--Joel

[Val Geist]

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: HowlBloom at aol.com 
  To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org 
  Sent: Monday, March 28, 2005 11:02 PM
  Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] From Eshel--A Glitch in Genetic-centrism--Joel


  Joel--What you say below sounds right to me.  If I understand it rightly,  time is a recursion of boundary-making, an iteration of a differentiating and aggregating process, a multiplier of the voids spaced between the nodes of isness, and a grower of the clusters between the voids--as in your cellular automata model.  It makes sense.

  And it fits with the notion that time is the most critical aspect of perception, an idea that Jeff Hawkins proposes in On Intelligence, one of the few new-idea-generating books I've read in a long time.  Perception in Hawkin's view is a flow, a music.  As in music, we spot thje sensory world's ur-patterns, its repetitive themes and their variations. 

  In higher cortical regions, we create invariant representations of a stream of sensations, we sift the themes from of a parade of sense-impacts, we capture the pattern of a surge of  impressions that follow each other like the notes in a melody. Hawkins thinks of these invariant representations as "Name that Tune"-style song-spotting.  We send the prediction that the name of the tune--the invariant representation-- implies back down to the sensory level of the cortex.  If the song title predicts the incoming stream properly, everything is fine.  If the incoming signal-surge no longer follows the melody predicted by the song title, more cortical regions are forced to rush in and try other song titles, other invariant representations, other names for the possible melody.

  The cosmos is process.  Time is as critical to understanding as are "things".  

  Perception has to mirror the cosmos to work.  So perception is a time-process, a temporal-flow-identifier-and-predictor, a future-projector that works by taking what's past and flipping it forward, sometimes with a new twist.  Music is practice for future-projection, for identifying patterns in the flow.  New musical styles and new songs are practice for the novelties that may lay around the bend.  Howard

  In a message dated 3/28/2005 11:07:39 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, isaacsonj at hotmail.com writes:
    I actually think more in terms of an Ur-Process that leads to Ur-Patterns.
    In my view, our cognitive apparatus is comprised of zillions of those
    Ur-Processes, interlocked in certain ways.   The very elemental  Ur-Process
    involves local recursive discrimination of differences.   Repeat:   LOCAL 
    RECURSIVE
    DISCRIMINATION OF DIFFERENCES is a key.   Interlocution of many
    Ur-Processes yields global Ur-Patterns that are pervasive in Nature, at all 
    scales.
    (Biology and genetics are subsumed under these processes and involve the 
    same
    patterns.)

    Such Ur-Patterns come to our awareness as "snapshots" during the incessant
    flow of the Ur-Processes.


  ----------
  Howard Bloom
  Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century
  Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
  www.howardbloom.net
  www.bigbangtango.net
  Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.
  For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org
  for two chapters from 
  The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
  For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  paleopsych mailing list
  paleopsych at paleopsych.org
  http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  No virus found in this incoming message.
  Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
  Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.8.4 - Release Date: 3/27/2005
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/attachments/20050329/e81037e7/attachment.html>