The emerging mind

This is an extract from the book "On the origin of Mind", chapter 14, describing how what we call the mind emerges from the physical state of a new brain. In those paragraphs the wording is kept deliberately generic to prove that even without special nomenclature the process can be expressed with a high degree of accuracy. There is no need to use metaphors as a substitute which ultimately will be open-ended anyway. The rest of the text does go into the technical detail, so much so that it serves as a guide to build an artificial mind via a computer program.

There is a universe composed of thousands and thousands of millions of singular, interconnected, expressionless, entities. The internal mechanism of every one of these provides for an awareness of the beyond, the creation of an effect, and the articulation of a response. The many thousands of connections enabled by each entity allow the results of its processes to be communicated to the multitude. That billion-fold multitude carries the energy supplied through its support, but in the absence of any disturbance the field, defined by the electro-chemical interchange across the units, remains suspended in an unstable balance.

Then - via conduits from the outside a perturbation affects the space around a locale. The even distribution of metabolic energy vectors falters to make room for the dislocation of the former matrix. Via the activating channels which link the temporal centre of activity the resonance spreads to neighbouring regions. It may dissipate in some, but in others the motion folds back on to another incoming wave, an equally articulate and rhythmic progression of a field disturbance. Its amplitude and frequency, the physical summation of a dynamic, becomes enhanced or diminished by the traces left by its predecessor. The combination of either effect, distinct in its historical characteristics yet related through their common fundamentals, becomes a further localised field.

The stream of perturbations from several such conduits continues to unseat the balance amongst the entities. The disturbances pair with those with which they are able to resonate, and accentuate their disparity towards others with unlike energy distributions. The field has turned from a monotonous whole to a diverse landscape of effects. Now that the inertia determined by the initial balance has been overcome, the diverse oscillations coalesce into entities of their own emerging centres of representative states. The communicative potential of each centre defines its relation with every other, and the outward-spreading field vectors together with the backwash of their resonance acquire the distinctive appearance of their source; thus the channels turn into flows of communication.

Just as the formation of distinct domains contributes to a further enhancement of localised specificity, so do the movements of information distinguish themselves according to the processes that sent them. Growing and disbanding affinities, and the assimilating and differentiating representations of such events, now characterise the previously amorphous system. The gradients of similarity and difference in themselves accentuate the creation of conglomerates, whose position within the range of those articulations place them in particular regions of functionality. As such a region manifests its source-related nature, and the information it is able to acquire as well as dissipate reflects its very particular characteristics. From now on, impressions from the outside will be differentiated.

And still the process of emergence continues. Bands of similarities broaden, but as they do so form interstices with their own accompanying distribution of field effects. Islands within islands form, and flows within flows connect them. Those localised perturbations, initially seeded by the outward wave of imbalances, have grown into self-defining domains of representational clusters. As affinity-seeking as their incoherent origins, they build cascading separations of reflecting, resonating structures - and all in their own right.

While the pervasive fabric of information flows keeps communication throughout the system going, a certain region becomes the receptor of the distributed fields from the newly-grown centres. Although similar in terms of responsiveness and as interconnected as the rest, there is one feature separating it fundamentally from all the others: it is able to sensate to its host, and its host is able to sensate to it. From this point onwards the domain-specific field effects across the functional space of this universe have found one resonance that, in relation to the system itself, can be active. The representational quality of a cluster has become translatable into a sensated expression: consciousness.

For the resonance to be re-directed it needs definition in relation to the shifting domains it attempts to interact with. In the beginning this definition lacks accent, and so the impressions are responded to with ambiguity and dissonance. The general existence of consciousness increasingly becomes an act of deliberate choice between one articulation or another, and between one targeted domain or another. From the erstwhile meaningless yet significant perturbations the field effects have matured into an accessible array of experiences, addressed in terms of their pronounced interpretation by the host. The sensate representation creates a 'light', 'dark', 'red', 'blue' and 'green'; in liege with accompanying movements of limbs which contribute their own sense feedback it defines a 'near', 'far', 'big' and 'small'; supported by sight and sound it learns about 'stillness' and 'movement'; and eventually, at an even more evolved domain structure, there comes the recognition of 'I' and 'you'.

The process of cluster formation and its derivatives together with the parallel developments of articulation and refinement leads to a tiered representation of content. Based on repeated implementations of affinity relationships between field effects, the corresponding structures align in terms of specific resonance between one state and the next. Raw data from importing conduits do not matter as much anymore and are relegated to different channels due to their dissonance. The connectivities between higher-level representations relate to their own functional distributions and no other, and whether they become sensate or not, their informative qualities elevate the perceptional power of their host to an extraordinary degree: abstractions are born. - -

The words used in the foregoing description of the emerging mind have been deliberatively kept at a high degree of generality. I wanted to show that it is possible to articulate such a development without relying on definite labels which have been gleaned from the field of neuroscience, the traditional home of these building blocks. At the same time, although not sufficiently accurate to serve as a hands-on manual for building a mind, they are precise enough to identify the actual features of the process.

© Martin Wurzinger - see Terms of Use