The Sage Forge

For some years I have been doing a sharper and ever sharper exploration of consciousness as I knew it.  As a natural artist the probe I use for this process is art.  As the child of parents trained in the sciences I knew to check my impressions before I spouted them off as findings through the lens of the best science I had available to me.

This process led me to an understanding of consciousness that included a realization that Human understanding is founded on a process of building models.  It is not hard to find examples of these models in even relatively primitive cognition.  Mice have, in their brains, structures that correspond with each of their whiskers.  All mamalian visual cortices include areas that map the retina essentially point for point.  Studies during brain surgery have shown equivalent mapping of the entire body for motor and sensory purposes.  When I looked into scientific studies of consciousness, however, I saw studies of neural responses and, more recently, on "mirror neurons".  This was stuff as useful to the understanding of consciousness as a study of rivets would be to the comprehension of the function of a submarine.

An example of finding inspiration in daily life was my epiphany at seeing the function of a television antenna rotator.  In this device the interior unit and the exterior unit have identical motor and gear sets.  The exterior unit rotated as long as the interior unit was running to get to the point the user chose.  As long as the two units ran the same way the correlation between the direction one chose to assign the antenna and that it actually assumed would be accurate.  In the same way our model of our body inside our brain learns to simulate the responses of the real mechanism so that they become predictable.  As long as this correspondence is strong we think nothing of it.  When the correspondence breaks down we become alarmed.

Human consciousness extends this model-building process to include conceptual modelling for more abstract notions like human behavior.  When we say we "know" someone what we mean is that we have constructed a model of their behavior that inhabits our mind and behaves in a way that helps us to understand how they act in our presence.  The more important that person is to us the more we modify our own personality "map" to function in concert with this "an-other map".  All one need do to comprehend the mapping of important others in our minds is to think of the latency that haunts us when we must let them go in death.

As I would talk to people about these things the ideas always seemed to be filled with novelty to others.  I could pat myself on the back, even imagine myself pretty darned smart.

Well, until Monday evening this week.  Thumbing through my Scientific American this week I find a review of a book by Douglas R. Hofstadter  who, it turns out had pretty thoroughly explored the realm I imagined myself discovering.  Only he did it back in 1979 in the Pulitzer Prize- winning book "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"

1979 was the year I graduated college, which slipped me out of contact with computer people for about half a decade.  The wave of Hofstadter's insights crested, crashed upon the intellectual shore, and receded from the larger public's view in a time when I was looking elsewhere.  While people in the field of computing were enthralled with the promise of these ideas I was oblivious.  Somehow I remained sufficiently out of touch to continue to be oblivious.

There is some solace in finding that one has generated a set of good ideas.  It is nice not to have been embarrassed in the process of finding out those ideas weren't original.  Still, it is a reminder of the human condition, of our innate limitations, of how finite one is in the face of a larger world.  Like Robert Scott, dying with his men on the way home after failing to reach the South Pole first I've spent a lot of my mind on a quest, only to find another man's flag at my goal.

Oh, well...  The winds may howl here and the tent flaps shudder, but at least I now know of a few books I need to read.  Unbeknownst to me a lot of people have been to this pole.  It's a big continent, though, and there is a lot of snow on which no foot has trod.