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<DIV>Dear Howard,</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In reading your commentary I am thrown back to the year I spent at he
institute of Konrad Lorenz, before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. What you
discuss was then subject of very lively attention especially since Lorenz's
institute was paired with an institute on cybernetics, then run by Mittelstaedt.
However, the ideas went back to the great Erich von Holst, who had investigated
neural functions. What Hawkins speaks about is the ancient, but exceedingly
serviceable concept of <U>pattern matching</U> as perception and which von Holst
enriched by the "re-afference principle". Lorenz responded by publishing in 1973
what is, in my judgment, his best work, a book on the natural history of
cognition, entitled in German "<EM>Die Rueckseite des Spiegels</EM>" (The
backside of the Mirror). I have no idea if it was translated into English.
However, I made good use of it and the discussions in Lorenz's institute to
write the second chapter of my Life strategies book, only that I applied it
broadly to animal behavior, and a lot of human include (intelligence, creativity
- among others). I also traced back some of the older literature. Its absolutely
fundamental material for an understanding of the evolution of organismal life
strategies, let alone higher cognitive functions. It refers to very ancient
processes without which life as we know it could not function. The
Wednesday morning seminars at Lorenz's institute were the sharpest
intellectually I have ever had the pleasure of attending. Unfortunately, some of
that excellence arose from the animosity between the three institutes united at
Seewiesen by the Max Planck society. Cheers, Val Geist</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=HowlBloom@aol.com
href="mailto:HowlBloom@aol.com">HowlBloom@aol.com</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=paleopsych@paleopsych.org
href="mailto:paleopsych@paleopsych.org">paleopsych@paleopsych.org</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Monday, March 28, 2005 11:02
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: [Paleopsych] From Eshel--A
Glitch in Genetic-centrism--Joel</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><FONT id=role_document face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>
<DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>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.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The cosmos is process. Time is as critical to understanding as are
"things". </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 3/28/2005 11:07:39 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
isaacsonj@hotmail.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>I
actually think more in terms of an Ur-Process that leads to
Ur-Patterns.<BR>In my view, our cognitive apparatus is comprised of zillions
of those<BR>Ur-Processes, interlocked in certain ways. The very
elemental Ur-Process<BR>involves local recursive discrimination of
differences. Repeat: LOCAL
<BR>RECURSIVE<BR>DISCRIMINATION OF DIFFERENCES is a key.
Interlocution of many<BR>Ur-Processes yields global Ur-Patterns that are
pervasive in Nature, at all <BR>scales.<BR>(Biology and genetics are
subsumed under these processes and involve the
<BR>same<BR>patterns.)<BR><BR>Such Ur-Patterns come to our awareness as
"snapshots" during the incessant<BR>flow of the
Ur-Processes.<BR></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>
<DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 PTSIZE="10"
FAMILY="SANSSERIF">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>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<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York
University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate
Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>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.<BR>For
information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see:
www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer Principle: A
Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see
www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution
of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see
www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></FONT>
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