Process and perception
This capacity for making high order discriminations about relationships between objects in our world, can be taken as the proper function of our cognitive competency. The attribute of intentionality, to this way of thinking, is best understood as "work product" of a discrete sub-module of our brain.
We infer agency from our observations. What is agency? Well first and foremost, it is that which is recognizable to the competencies in process, that form these judgments.
Does this sound circular? Surely it is circular in a crucial sense. All that we "know" comes to our attention as the work product of process in various competencies. Ultimately the "authority" of these high order discriminations comes not from a judgment about the correlation between our perceptions and the state of the "objective" world, but instead from their immediacy. This is to say that we do not perceive and then make judgments, our first awareness of every "thing" is located in the moment that the competent module forms some thing out of the possibilities.
These awareness's are not in the semantic domain. Our knowing of particular attributes precedes the semantic transform that tags and packages up insights, for storage and shipping. We know what we know and we apologize for not being able to convey this knowing more effectively.
That we are able to communicate at all, is a testament to the power of trial and error and the phenomenal similarity of our minds. This similarity is not accidental. Even as each person is an absolutely unique instance of humanity, what we are, is the embodiment of a phenomenally complex tangle of historical accomplishments that is fundamentally common to us all.
Creativity emerges via the capacity/ability to merge contexts
Biological instrumentality:
The complex objects of our knowings come to our awareness as circumstances demand, literally selected by their features. Apprehension of the world via a sophisticatedly evolved biological instrumentality is an entropy hack. Life is the opportunistic bloom of a viral exploitation of regularity in the universe.
In the beginning there was sequence, and it begat pattern and context space. Within every context space there is a tree of combinatorial consequences some leaves of which are potentially lucky. Blind evolution isn't trial and error testing of mistakes (mutations), it is the random testing of legal combinations
So who set up the game, where did the rules come from, and the design language?
The dynamic core of our consciousness consists of transient alignments of Feature Value - Action loops that compete for selection in a flicker-dance-sort of associations and sensory stimuli.
Perception is a physics hack. Timing is everything. Three dimensionality is accessible to us via a cross mapping within the temporal manifold. Propagation of coherent correlations between map-mapped sheets of neurons act as a massively parallel delay line with multiple taps. Because both spatial and temporal coherence is preserved, the network sorts up the objects of perception and tracks them real time. Reality is best fit. Misperceptions happen, but its better than being blind.
Our competency at this is not postulated, it is stipulated that the high order discriminations we perceive as qualia are exactly as amazing as the incredible complexity of the neurological stack that gives us them.
Intentionality is an emergent design goal in secondary consciousness.
(before getting upset about intentional language, remember that it works because reality fits.)
Phenomenal transform is a semantic label for a context shift. If you insist on thinking of it as a happening, what's happening is that we find ourselves switching lexicons when we discuss certain things. Its not a description of a change of state in the object, it is a handle for referring to a pragmatic feature of discourse about it.
The important thing to realize is that this sorting out of the features of the objects of our perception usually is done before we are aware of the process, but this does not mean that the process is different for hard discriminations, just that they are taking longer than the ~400ms self context loop, that feeds a product of the net's immediate state back into itself. Think convolving and converging. Discrimination occurs opportunistically, our competencies do not require conscious attention. In the formation of PV Action loops each project become one of the factions in our interior parliament.
We have lots of timing to tap. Response times, flicker fusion times, saccades, pulse, peristalsis, menstruation. The royal road to cognitive illumination is the path of chronus.
--bob
"me, I'm just a lawn mower"
