I have struggled to connect the moments at which I have time to write with the moments in which relevant ideas occur to me to write about.  Earlier this evening, while writing an email and making an approximation to that statement, I had a moment of inspiration.  This (hopefully) will be the first in a series of posts in which I try to put that inspiration into words.  The very fact that a sudden thought can spawn so lengthy a description is in itself the purpose for this first post.

Our human minds function by collecting and integrating lower-level concepts into higher level concepts in a hierarchical tree.   This is not a new idea – this is one of the main bases of Ayn Rand’s theory of epistemology, which I will resist fully sketching here.  The hierarchy starts with observations by our senses.  These concrete perceptions are passed into our working memory, and if sufficiently unique, impressive, or dramatic, these in turn pass into persistent “long term” memory.  When we experience repetitions of perceptions that have similarities between them, our minds create a category for those perceptions, and long term memory retains an abstract description of the similarities.  This is a purely human trait, and an absolutely necessary ability for any creature that can be called intelligent.

For example, you have perceived hundreds if not thousands of houses in your lifetime.  If your mind were burdened with the need to retain in long term memory the details of each house you have ever seen (along with every other perception you have ever had), you would soon reach the end of your capacity to remember.  This is the condition of every animal other than humans.  The human mind automatically creates a category for “house”, connected to a definition (something like an enclosed structure providing shelter, storage space for property, and typically facilities for cooking, washing, and sleeping).  Then almost all houses are recognized as houses, but their details are forgotten, with only houses of importance to the individual being remembered in detail.  This category we call a concept, and concepts almost always are labeled by a word in a language.

Concepts themselves are further abstracted into higher level categories.  Continuing with our example, house can be grouped with office, mall, lighthouse, museum, and library into the concept “building”.  Building may be combined with bridge, monument, radio tower into manmade structure.  And so on, forming a rich hierarchy of concepts connected ultimately to perceptions.

Man also has the ability to connect concepts through reason, using logic, and to observe and remember cause and effect.  This ability leads to a very different and much more powerful form of abstraction.  Starting with observing individual connections between concepts, and occurrences of connected events (cause and effect), the mind again abstracts to form generalizations, and again will forget the details of each observation or occurrence (other than examples that have a major impact on the particular human).  These generalizations again form a hierarchy, and if properly constructed, almost every concept will be found to be connected through generalizations to every other concept in the mind.  (A failure of this proper construction leads to separated islands of connected concepts, which in turn implies that the mind is carrying contradictions, which in turn is the basis for most psychological difficulties, but that is definitely a separate topic).

If a mind is formed properly (which is volitional, not accidental), it is a grand web of connections between millions of concepts, thousands of generalizations, and dozens if not hundreds of levels of abstraction, all connected in one massive network of thought.  Inherent in the human ability to create and maintain this structure is the ability of internal self-reflection.  It is that very capability – to examine the interconnections present across a vast field of concepts through deep layers of abstraction – that allow us to create even more connections and even deeper levels of abstraction.  This process is far from static – it starts at birth and continues until death (the aging brain will suffer from loss of parts of the network,  but we will simply note that and move on).

In a well-formed mind, the process of creating new abstractions happens both gradually, as the mind reflects on the existing connections and forms new ones, but can also happen in the spur of a moment.  At any moment, a set of perceptions can occur in rapid succession which recall to working memory a set of concepts and related generalizations that had never been present in working memory simultaneously before.  The active mind, reflecting on these elements of working memory can instantly recognize a new connection.  This recognition can draw upon more related and higher-level generalizations, which have also never co-existed in working memory, causing a further new abstraction to form at a higher level.  If not interrupted, this process can erupt in a storm of activity, ending only when the very highest levels of abstraction are reached, and a new massive interconnection is realized, and stored in long term memory.  This entire process may require only a few seconds to complete, though cementing it in long term memory will require many minutes, or perhaps hours, of subsequent self-reflection.