Full
Reference: Gabora, L. (2000) Conceptual closure:
Weaving memories into an interconnected worldview. In (G. Van
de Vijver & J.
Conceptual Closure: How
Memories are Woven into an Interconnected Worldview
LIANE M. GABORA
Center
Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies
Vrije Universiteit Brussel,
Krijgskundestraat 33, B-1160
Phone:
+32-2-644 26 77
Fax: +32-2-644 07 44
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a
tentative model for how discrete memories transform into an interconnected
conceptual network, or worldview, wherein relationships between memories are
forged by way of abstractions. The model draws on Kauffman’s theory of how an
information-evolving system could emerge through the formation and closure of
an autocatalytic network. Here, the information units are not catalytic
molecules, but memories and abstractions, and the process that connects them is
not catalysis but reminding events (i.e. one memory evokes another). The result
is a worldview that both structures, and is structured by, self-triggered streams
of thought.
1. INTRODUCTION
Being a
physically closed system, the living organism is richly interconnected (e.g.,
by way of sensorimotor and endocrine systems), which endows it with behavioral contextuality. That is, any
perturbation will percolate through the interconnected system and elicit a
response tailored to the specifics of the perturbation. Conceptual closure is a
second level of closure, in conceptual space rather than physical space. That
is, the mind is conceptually closed in the sense that every concept, belief, et
cetera, impacts, and is impacted by, a sphere of related concepts and beliefs,
and the network is closed in the sense that there exists a 'conceptual pathway'
through streams of associative recall from any one concept to any other. This
second form of closure further enhances the potential for behavioral contextuality by enabling the individual to engage in
relational streams of associative thought that refine potential behaviors in
light of goals or imagined outcomes. This paper addresses the question of how
conceptual closure might be achieved. That is, how does the mind weave memories
of specific experiences into a relationally-structured worldview? It is the
relational or associative structure of the human mind that enables us to
strategically generate and refine ideas, and thereby provides us with the
capacity for culture. So the question is important.
The
explanation proposed here was inspired by a theory of the origin of life. The
origin of life and the origin of human cognition may appear at first glance to
be very different problems. However, deep down they amount to the same thing:
the bootstrapping of a system by which variants of an information pattern are
generated, and the selective proliferation of some variants over others [2, 7].
Culture, like biology, can be viewed as a form of evolution, albeit one that
manifests differently from biological evolution. In keeping with this
evolutionary framework, the term ‘meme’ will be used to refer to a unit of
cultural information as it is represented in the brain. For our purposes, a
meme can be anything from an idea for a recipe, to a memory of one’s uncle, to
a concept of size, to an attitude of racial prejudice. The rationale for
lumping these together is that they are all ‘food for thought’—units of
information drawn upon to invent new memes or to clarify relationships amongst
existing ones—that can be implemented as actions, vocalizations, or artifacts.
It
is a good idea to start off by clarifying the difference between conceptual
closure and psychic closure [22]. As I see it, the concepts are similar, but
whereas psychic closure focuses more on individuals as intentional systems,
conceptual closure focuses more on mental representations and their
interrelations.
2. Origin of
the Cognitive Underpinnings of Culture: A Paradox
The early
human memory appears to have been, like that of a primate, limited to the
storage and cued retrieval of specific episodes [9]. Accordingly, Donald [3]
uses the term episodic to designate a
mind such as this that consists only of episodic memories, no abstractions. The
episodic mind is dominated by the present moment. Occasionally it encounters a
stimulus that is similar enough to some stored episode to evoke a retrieval or reminding event, and sometimes the stimulus
evokes a reflexive, or (with much training) learned response. However, it has
great difficulty accessing memories independent of environmental cues. It can
not manipulate symbols and abstractions, or invent them on its own, and is unable
to improve skills through self-cued rehearsal. It seems to encode each episode
as a separate, un-modifiable entity.
In
contrast, the modern human mind uses abstractions to define relationships between episodes, and relates
abstractions to one another by way of higher-order abstractions. It can
retrieve and recursively operate on memories independent of environmental cues,
a process referred to by Karmiloff-Smith [11] as representational redescription. By redescribing an episode in terms
of what is already known, it gets rooted in the network of understandings that
comprise the worldview, and the worldview is perpetually revised as new
experiences are assimilated and abstract concepts invented as needed.
The
existence of this uniquely human form of cognition leaves us with a nontrivial
question of origins. What sort of functional reorganization would turn an
episodic mind into that of a modern human? In the absence of representational
redescription, how are relationships established such that the memory becomes
an interwoven conceptual web? And until a memory incorporates relationships,
how can one idea evoke another, which evokes another, in a stream of
representational redescription? In other words, if you need a worldview to
generate a stream of thought, and streams of thought are necessary to connect
memes into a worldview, how could one have come into existence without the
other? We have a chicken-and-egg problem.
3. An Analogous Paradox: The
Origin of Life
The origin
of life presents an analogous paradox: if living things come into existence
when other living things give birth to them, how did the first living thing
arise? That is, how did something complex enough to reproduce itself come to
be? In biology, self-replication is orchestrated through an intricate network
of interactions between DNA, RNA, and proteins. DNA contains instructions for
how to construct various proteins. Proteins, in turn, both catalyze reactions
that orchestrate the decoding of DNA by RNA, and are used to construct a body
to house and protect all this self-replication machinery. Once again, we have a
chicken-and-egg problem. If proteins are made by decoding DNA, and DNA requires
the catalytic action of proteins to be decoded, which came first?
Thus
we have two paradoxes—the origin of the psychological mechanisms underlying
culture, and the origin of life—which from here on will be referred to as OOC
and OOL respectively. The parallels between them are intriguing. In each case
we have a system composed of complex, mutually interdependent parts, and it is
not obvious how either part could have arisen without the other. In both cases,
one part is a storehouse of encoded information about a self in the context of
an environment. In the OOL, DNA encodes instructions for the construction of a
body that is likely to survive in an environment like that its ancestors
survived. In the OOC, an internal model of the world encodes information about
the self, the environment, and the relationships between them. In both cases,
decoding a segment of this information storehouse generates another class of
information unit that coordinates how the storehouse itself gets decoded.
Decoding DNA generates proteins that orchestrate the decoding of DNA.
Retrieving a memory or concept from the worldview and bringing it into
awareness generates an instant of experience, which in turn determines which
are the relevant portion(s) of the worldview to be retrieved to generate the next instant of experience. (For
example, if you had the thought ‘my spouse seems sad’, you might rack your
brain to see what could have caused this.)
4. Weaving Catalytic
Molecules into a Primitive Form of Life
Kauffman
[12] proposed that life may have begun not with a single molecule capable of replicating
itself, but with a set of collectively self-replicating molecules.
His proposal combines the concept of organizational closure [13, 14, 17, 18, 23] with insights from random graph theory [4, 5]. When
polymers interact, the number of different polymers increases exponentially. However, the number of reactions by which they can interconvert
increases faster than their total number. Thus, as their diversity increases,
so does the probability that some subset of the total reaches a critical point
where there is a catalytic pathway to every member.
Such a set is autocatalytically closed because each molecule can
catalyze the replication of some other molecule in the set, and likewise, its
own replication is catalyzed by some other member of the set. (Note that it is not necessarily closed in the sense that
new molecules cannot be incorporated into the set.) Experimental evidence for this theory using real chemistries
[13, 14, 19], and computer simulations [6] have been unequivocally supportive.
5. Weaving
Memories into a Conceptually Closed Worldview
In order
for humanity to become capable of evolving culture, the brains of some
prehistoric tribe somehow turned into instruments for the variation, selection,
and replication of memes. How might Fred, a member of this tribe, have differed
from his ancestors such that he was able to initiate this kind of
transformation? Donald [3] claims that the transition from episodic to memetic
culture “would have required a fundamental change in the way the brain operates.”
Drawing from the OOL scenario, we will posit that meme evolution begins with
the emergence of a collective autocatalytic entity that acts as both code and
decoder.
In
the OOL case, Kauffman asked: what was lying around on the primitive earth with
the potential to act as the 'food set' of a primitive self-replicating system?
The most promising candidate is catalytic polymers, the molecular constituents
of either protein or RNA. Here we ask: what sort of information unit does the
episodic mind have at its disposal? It has memes, specifically memories of
episodes. Episodic memes then constitute the food set of our system.
Next,
Kauffman asked: what happens to the
food set to turn it into a self-replicating system? In the OOL case, food set
molecules catalyze reactions on each other that increased their joint
complexity, eventually transforming some subset of themselves into a collective
web for which there existed a catalytic pathway to the formation of each member
molecule. An analogous process could transform an episodic mind into a memetic
one. Food set memes activate redescriptions of each other that increase their
joint complexity, eventually transforming some subset of themselves into a
collective web for which there exists a retrieval pathway to the formation of
each member meme. Much as polymer A brings polymer B into existence by
catalyzing its formation, meme A brings meme B into conscious awareness by
retrieving it from memory. Note that a ‘retrieval’ can
be reminding, a redescription of something in light of new contextual
information, or a creative blend or reconstruction of many stored memes.
To
get more specific about how this might happen, we need to briefly summon what
we have learned from neurobiology and cognitive science, and build a best-guess
model of human cognition. The first thing to note is that memory is sparse. Where n is the number of features the senses can distinguish, N, the
number of memes that could potentially be held in attention = 2n for boolean
variables (and it is infinitely large for continuous variables). For example,
if n =1,000, N = 21,000 memes (or even more if we assume that the
mind rarely if ever attends all the stimulus dimensions it is capable of
detecting). Since assuming n is
large, N is enormous, so the number of
locations L where memes can be stored
is only a small fraction of the N perceivable
memes. The number of different memes
actually stored at a given time, s,
is constrained by L, as well as by the
variety of perceptual experience, and the fact that meme retrieval, though
distributed at the storage end, is serial at the awareness end. That is, the
rate at which streams of thought reorganize the memetic network is limited by
the fact that everything is funneled through an awareness/attention mechanism;
we can only figure one thing out at a time.
The
set of all possible n-dimensional memes a mind is capable of storing can be
represented as the set of vertices (if features assume only binary values) or
points (if features assume continuous values) in an n-dimensional hypercube, where the s stored memes occupy some subset of these points. The distance
between two points in this space is a measure of how dissimilar they are,
referred to as the Hamming distance. Kanerva [10] makes some astute
observations about this space. The number of memes at Hamming distance d away from any given meme is equal to
the binomial coefficient of n and d, which is well approximated by a
Gaussian distribution. Thus if meme X is 111...1 and its antipode is 000...0,
and we consider meme X and its antipode to be the ‘poles’ of the hypersphere,
then approximately 68% of the other memes lie within one standard deviation
(sqrt[n]) of the ‘equator’ region
between these two extremes (Figure 1). As we move through Hamming space away
from the equator toward either Meme X or its antipode, the probability of
encountering a meme falls off sharply by the proportion sqrt[n]/n.
Figure 1. Solid black curve is a schematic distribution of the Hamming distances
from address of a given meme to addresses of other memory locations in a sparse
memory. The Gaussian distribution arises
because there are many more ways of sharing an intermediate number of features
than there are of being extremely similar or different. A computer memory
stores each item in only the left-most address, whereas a distributed network
stores it throughout the network. A restricted activation function, such as the
radial basis function, is intermediate between these two extremes. Activation
decreases with distance from the ideal address, as indicated by gray shading.
The
space of possibilities is so vast that the probability one's current experience
is identical to an experience stored in memory is virtually zero. Therefore,
retrieval should be impossible. In a
neural network—a computer architecture inspired by how brains learn and
retrieve information—this problem is solved by distributing the storage of a
meme across many locations. Likewise, each location participates in the storage
of many memes. The stimulus can be represented as input/output nodes, memory
locations as hidden nodes, and their pattern of connectivity as weighted links.
(It may be that memes are not represented in this sort of granular manner, but
the general idea can be adapted to other forms of representation.) An input
touches off a pattern of activation which spreads through the network until it
relaxes into a stable configuration, or achieves the desired input-output
mapping using a learning algorithm. The output vector is determined through
linear summation of weighted inputs. Thus, a retrieved meme is not activated
from a dormant state, but ‘reconstructed’, and therefore it is not necessarily
identical to the stimulus that evoked it.
How
can such a network avoid interference amongst the stored patterns? By restricting the
distributed activation (as in a radial basis function). In the OOL case,
it was crucial that the polymers be catalytic; Kauffman gave each polymer a
small, random probability P of
catalyzing each reaction. Here we do something similar. A hypersphere of
locations is activated, such that activation is maximal at the center and
tapers off in all directions according to a Gaussian distribution (see Figure
1). The lower the neuron activation
threshold, the wider this distribution, and therefore the more memes are
activated in response to any given meme. Another way the mind prevents
interference is by being modular;
that is, different regions of the brain specialize in the processing of
different kinds of information.
The
final feature we will note about the brain is that it is content-addressable. That is, there is a correspondence between the
location in conceptual space where a meme is stored, and its semantic content.
Thus each meme can only evoke, or activate, other memes that are similar to it.
For example, when considering the problem of having to get out of your car
every day to open the garage door, you would not think about doilies or existentialism,
but concepts related to the problem—electricity, human laziness, and various
openers you have encountered before.
Let
us now consider what would happen if, due to a genetic mutation, Fred’s neuron
activation threshold were significantly lower than average for his tribe. Thus,
a greater diversity of memes are activated in response
to a given experience, and a larger portion of the contents of memory merge and
surface to awareness in the next instant. When meme X goes fishing in memory
for meme X', sooner or later this large hypersphere is bound to ‘catch’ a
stored meme that is quite unlike X. For example, since Fred sees the sun every
day, there are lots of ‘sun-dominated episodes’ stored in his brain. Let us say
they consist of a sequence of ten 0’s followed by a five bit long variable
sequence. One night he looks up into the heavens and sees the Evening Star,
which gets represented in his focus as 000000011101010. This Evening Star
episode will be referred to as meme X. Because the hypersphere is wide, all of
the sun memories lie close enough to meme X to get evoked in the construction
of X' (as is X itself). Since all the components from which X' is made begin
with a string of seven zeros, there is no question that X' also begins with
seven zeros. These positions might code for features such as ‘appears in sky’,
‘luminous’, etc. The following set of
three 1s in the ‘sun’ memes are canceled out by the 0s in the ‘Evening Star’
meme, so in X' they are represented as *s. These positions might code for
features such as ‘seen during the day’. The last five bits constituting the
variable region are also statistically likely to cancel one another out. These
code for other aspects of the experience, such as, say, the smell of food
cooking or the sound of wind howling. So X' turns out to be the meme
0000000********, the generic category ‘heavenly body’, which then gets stored
in memory in the next iteration. This evocation of ‘heavenly body’ by the
Evening Star episode isn’t much of a stream of thought, and it doesn’t bring
Fred much closer to an interconnected conceptual web, but it is an important
milestone. It is the first time he ever derived a new meme from other memes,
his first abstraction, his first creative act.
Once
‘heavenly body’ has been evoked and stored in memory, the locations involved
habituate and become refractory (so, for instance, ‘heavenly body’ does not
recursively evoke ‘heavenly body’). However, locations storing memes that have some ‘heavenly body’ features, but that
were not involved in the storage of ‘heavenly body’, are still active.
‘Heavenly body’ might activate ‘moon’, and then perhaps ‘cloud’ et cetera, thus strengthening
associations between the abstract category and its instances. Other
abstractions form in analogous fashion. As Fred accumulates both episodic memes
and abstractions, the probability that any given attended meme is similar
enough to some previously-stored meme to activate it increases. Therefore
reminding acts increase in frequency, and eventually become streams of
remindings, which get progressively longer. He is now
capable of a train of thought. His memory is no longer just a way-station for
coordinating stimuli with action; it is a forum for abstractive operations that
emerge through the dynamics of iterative retrieval.
Note that in the OOL case, since short, simple
molecules are more abundant and readily-formed than long, complex ones, it made
sense to expect that the food set molecules were the shortest and simplest
members of the autocatalytic set that eventually formed. Accordingly, in
simulations of this process, the ‘direction’ of novelty generation is outward,
joining less complex molecules to form more complex ones through AND
operations. In contrast, the memetic food set molecules are complex, consisting
of all attended features of an episode. In order for them to form an
interconnected web, their interactions tend to move in the opposite direction,
starting with relatively complex memes and forming simpler, more abstract ones
through OR operations. The net effect of the two is the same: a network
emerges, and joint complexity increases. But what this means for the OOC is
that there are numerous levels of autocatalytic closure, which convey varying
degrees of worldview interconnectedness and consistency on their ‘meme hosts’.
These levels correspond to increased penetration of the (n-1, n-2…)-dimensional
nested hypercubes implicit in an n-dimensional
memory space. Since it is difficult to
visualize the set of nested, multidimensional hypercubes, we will represent
this structure as a set of concentric circles, such the outer skin of this
onion-like structure represents the hypercube with all n dimensions, and deeper circles represent lower-dimensional
hypercubes (Figure 2). Obviously, not all the nested levels can be shown. The
centermost location where a meme is stored is shown as a large, black dot.
Figure 2. The role of abstractions in creative
thought. For ease of visualization, the set of nested hypercubes
representing the space of possible memes is shown as a set of concentric
circles, where deeper circles store deeper layers of abstraction (lower
dimensional hypercubes). A black dot represents the
centermost storage location for a specific meme. ‘Heavenly body’ is a more
general concept than ‘sun’ or ‘star’, and is therefore stored at a deeper layer
of abstraction. Grey circle around each stored meme represents hypersphere where the meme gets stored and from which the
next meme is retrieved.
The outermost shell encodes memes in whatever
form they are in the first time they are consciously encountered. This is all
the episodic mind has to work with. In order for one meme in this shell to
evoke another, they have to be extremely similar at a superficial level. In a
memetic mind, however, related concepts are within reach of one another because
they are stored in overlapping hyperspheres. ‘Sun’ and ‘star’ might be
too far apart in Hamming distance for one to evoke the
other directly. However, by attending the abstraction ‘Heavenly Body’, which
ignores the ‘seen at night versus seen during the day’ distinction, the memetic
mind decreases the apparent Hamming distance between them.
Under
what conditions will the transformation from discrete memories to interconnected
conceptual web actually occur? In the OOL case, Kauffman had to show that R,
the number of reactions, increased faster than N, the number of polymers; thus
for a large range of values of R and N, the system inevitably reaches a phase
transition to a critical state wherein for some subset of memes there exists a
retrieval pathway to each meme in the subset. How do we know that streams of
thought will do the same thing? We need to show that some subset of the memes
stored in an individual’s mind inevitably reach a critical point where there
exists a retrieval pathway by which every meme in that subset can get evoked.
But here, it is not reasonable to
assume that all N perceivable memes
actually exist (and can therefore partake in retrieval operations). The
awareness/attention filter presents a bottleneck that has no analog in the OOL
scenario. As a result, whereas OOL polymers underwent a sharp transition to a state of autocatalytic closure, the
transition in inter-meme relatedness is expected to take place gradually. So we need to show that R, the diversity of ways one meme can
evoke another, increases faster than not
N but s, the number of stored
memes (i.e., memes that have made it through this bottleneck). That is, as the
memory assimilates memes, it comes to have more ways of generating memes than
the number of memes that have explicitly been stored in it.
Under
what conditions does R increases
faster than s? The reader is referred
to [8] for the mathematical details, but the key idea is that abstraction
increases s by creating a new meme,
but it increases R more, because the
more abstract the concept, the greater the number of memes a short Hamming
distance away (since irrelevant dimensions make no contribution to Hamming
distance). Moreover, as n starts to
decrease the number of possible abstractions for each value of n increases (up to M/2, after which it starts to decrease). Whereas R increases as abstraction makes
relationships amongst memes increasingly explicit, s levels off as new experiences have to be increasingly unusual in
order to count as new and get stored in a new constellation of locations.
Furthermore, when the carrying capacity of the memory is reached, s plateaus, but R does not. Thus, as long as the neuron activation threshold is
large enough to permit abstraction and small enough to permit temporal
continuity, the average value of n decreases,
and sooner or later, the system is expected to reach a critical percolation
threshold such that R increases
exponentially faster than s. The memory
becomes so densely packed that any meme that comes to occupy the focus is bound
to be close enough in Hamming distance to some previously-stored meme(s) to
evoke it. The memory (or some portion of it) is holographic, in the sense that
there is a pathway of associations from any one meme to any other; together
they form an autocatalytic set. What was once just a collection of isolated
memories is now a structured network of concepts, instances, and
relationships—a worldview.
Now
that we have an autocatalytic network of memes, how does it self-replicate? In
the OOL scenario, polymer molecules accumulate one by one until there are at
least two copies of each, and their shell divides through budding to create a
second replicant. In the OOC scenario, Fred shares concepts, ideas, stories,
and experiences with his children and tribe members, spreading his worldview
meme by meme. In Farmer et al.'s OOL simulation [6], mentioned earlier, the
probability of autocatalysis could be increased by raising either the probability
of catalysis or the number of polymers. Something similar happens here. Even if
Fred’s daughter Pebbles has a higher neuron activation threshold than Fred,
once she has assimilated enough of Fred’s abstractions, her memes become so
densely packed that a version of Fred’s worldview snaps into place in her mind.
Pebbles shares her
worldview with her friend Bambam, who in turn shares
it with the rest of the tribe. These different hosts expose their ‘copy’ of
Fred’s original worldview to different experiences, different bodily
constraints, sculpting them into unique internal models of the world. Small
differences are amplified through positive feedback, transforming the space of
viable worldview niches. Individuals whose activation threshold is too small to
achieve worldview closure are at a reproductive disadvantage, and, over time,
eliminated from the population. Eventually the proclivity for an ongoing stream
of thought becomes so firmly entrenched that it takes devoted yogis years of
meditation to even briefly arrest it.
6. Worldview
Expansion and Viability
The most
primitive level of autocatalytic closure is achieved when stored episodes are
interconnected by way of abstractions just a few ‘onionskin layers’ deep, and
streams of thought zigzag between these superficial layers. A second level
occurs when relationships amongst these
abstractions are identified by higher-order abstractions at deeper onionskin
layers. Et cetera.
Once an individual has defined an abstraction, identified its instances, and
chunked them together in memory, she can manipulate the abstraction much as she
would a concrete episode.
Categorization
creates new lower-dimension memes, which makes the space denser, and increases
susceptibility to the autocatalytic state. On the other hand, creating new
memes by combining stored memes could interfere with the establishment of a
sustained stream of thought by decreasing the modularity of the space, and
thereby decreasing density. If cross-category blending indeed disrupts conceptual
closure, one might expect it to be less evident in younger children than in
older ones, and this expectation is born out experimentally [11]. There is
evidence of a similar shift in human history from an emphasis on ritual and
memorization toward an emphasis on innovation [3]. As world-views become more
complex, the artifacts we put into the world become more complex, which
necessitates even more complex world-views, et cetera, thus a positive feedback
cycle sets in.
Van
de Vijver [22] suggests that the cognitive system
grows through a process of identification, a view that is highly compatible
with the ideas proposed here. It is attended stimuli that get assimilated and
integrated into the worldview, and attention involves an identity relationship
between the stimulus, and the mental representation of it. Not necessarily all
encountered stimuli would be expected to undergo this identification process.
Much as biological closure shields off toxic substances yet promotes the
assimilation of food necessary for maintenance and growth, conceptual closure
involves censorship of potentially harmful memes, and assimilation of ones that
could generate thought trajectories that enhance individual wellbeing (in other
words, the fruits of their travels in conceptual space manifest as enhanced contextuality in physical space). The more stimuli the
conceptual system has assimilated, the more of external reality it can capture,
thus the greater the potential of the individual to adapt itself to its
environment. However, accuracy is not the only determinant of what makes a
successful worldview. A viable worldview is one that reinforces thought
trajectories that lead to behaviors that enhance individual wellbeing. As Trivers [20, 21] suggests, this may involve a certain amount
of bias or self-deception.
In
fact, though it would seem that in the transition from the episodic mind to the
memetic mind, we have made enormous progress, this isn't necessarily the case.
The episodic mind, in fact, has no
inconsistencies. Since it doesn’t represent relationships, it doesn’t get any
relationships wrong. It never encoded the sun and the stars as different kinds
of entities in the first place, so if it were to go further and further away
from the sun until it realized that the sun is just like any other star, no
conceptual adjustment would have to be made. Thus there is a tradeoff between
abstraction and accuracy.
Once
a new stimulus or episode has been attended, it still has to get incorporated
into the conceptual network; its relationships to previously identified stimuli
need to be worked out. Kauffman suggests that the autocatalytic molecular set
oscillates between a supracritical phase¾wherein the system is robust enough
to accept new molecules¾and a subcritical phase¾wherein the integration of
recently-acquired molecules temporarily challenges the system's robustness,
such that new ones are not accepted. In other words, the system grows by
cycling back and forth between an open state wherein new inputs are acquired, and a closed state wherein these inputs are
integrated into the system at large. It may be that the sleep-wake cycle is an
analogous oscillation of the conceptual system between perceptual openness
(awake), and integration of perceived stimuli (sleep). During the day, the parent
may help keep the child’s mind perpetually poised at a supracritical state by
interacting with the child in ways that promote the formation of novel
abstractions. This kind of parental guidance is analogous to handcrafting new
polymers to be readily-integrated into a particular autocatalytic set.
We
began by noting that conceptual closure increases the potential contextuality of a system's behavior. We generally use contextuality as a rough indicator of degree of awareness;
the more contextual the system's behavior, the more likely we are to say that
it is conscious, that there is something it is like to
be that system. This suggests that
each successive level of closure—first biological, then conceptual—locks the
system into a more concentrated state of awareness, like light trapped in
mirrors. This would require that there exist some kind of nascent,
proto-awareness prior to closure, which seems unlikely. However the idea is not
unpopular, even in academia. According to Chalmers’ [1] double aspect theory,
for at least some information spaces, whenever an information state in that
space is realized physically, it is also realized phenomenally. (An extreme
version is panpsychism—the idea that all information
has a conscious aspect.) The theory seems very counterintuitive. However, if it
were true, it is unlikely we would be
aware of it. Why? Because we are the products of millions of years of selective
forces perfecting our ability to accentuate the subjectivity we ourselves
experience, and shield off the subjectivity other entities are experiencing.
This is necessary in order to convince a living system to consume other plants
or animals in order to survive. (If an entity valued all conscious experience
equally, it would not act to preserve its own experience at the expense of the
experience of other entities.) Thus, the double aspect theory of information is
consistent with the possibility that closure is accompanied by a phase shift in
the potential for conscious experience.
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