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.\u00a0 Earlier this evening, while writing an email and making an approximation to that statement, I had a moment of inspiration.\u00a0 This (hopefully) will be the first in a series of posts in which I try to put that inspiration into words.\u00a0 The\u00a0very fact that a sudden thought can spawn so lengthy a description is in itself the purpose for this first post.<\/p>\n
Our human minds function by collecting and integrating lower-level\u00a0concepts into higher level concepts in a hierarchical tree.\u00a0 \u00a0This 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.\u00a0 The hierarchy starts with observations by our senses.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is a purely human trait, and an absolutely necessary ability for any creature that can be called intelligent.<\/p>\n
For example, you have perceived hundreds if not thousands of houses in your lifetime.\u00a0 If your mind were burdened with the need to retain in long term memory\u00a0the 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.\u00a0 This is the condition of every animal other than humans.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This category we call a concept, and concepts almost always are labeled by a word in a language.<\/p>\n
Concepts themselves are further abstracted into higher level categories.\u00a0 Continuing with our example, house can be grouped with office, mall, lighthouse, museum, and library into the concept “building”.\u00a0 Building may be combined with bridge, monument, radio tower into manmade structure.\u00a0 And so on, forming a rich hierarchy of concepts connected ultimately to perceptions.<\/p>\n
Man also has the ability to connect concepts through reason, using logic, and to observe and remember cause and effect.\u00a0 This ability leads to a very different and much more powerful form of abstraction.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (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).<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Inherent in the human ability to create and maintain this structure is the ability of internal self-reflection.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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,\u00a0 but we will simply note that and move on).<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The active mind, reflecting on these elements of working memory can instantly recognize a new connection.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0 Earlier this evening, while writing an email and making an approximation to that statement, I had a moment<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225,"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions\/225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nutmegfamilies.com\/aaronnturner\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}