Reality's Role in Cognition

Sum, ergo cogito

These are some personal concepts on the nature of intelligence. The following was inspired by Descartes, Leibniz and Langan for the most part.

Reality and Cognition

1. Reality is and contains everything that is real and nothing that is anything but real. Unreal things are excluded from present existence on an ontological basis and nothing exists outside reality.¹ Reality cannot contradict itself without becoming not-real, and so is completely consistent with itself and contains all truth. Every real interaction exclusively involves that which is real.

2. Reality cognises. All cognitive observation, processing, output, and feedback takes place within the bounds of reality, involving bodies, functions, vectors, quantities, and qualities composed of and defined with respect to reality. On an ontological level, cognition and action are a self-contained system involving reality alone.

3. However, on a functional level, the act of cognition involves a subject and object; though in the act of observing, a subject may observe itself, becoming, like reality, a self-contained observer and observed, giving rise to local subjectivity.

Distribution and States

4. Likewise, in the act of existing, a thing may exist in relation to itself, being a discrete ontological locus.²

5. Loci can exist in relation to one another. Each locus in a plurality of loci exists in relation to each of the other loci not only as itself, but as a locus existing in relation to other loci. A locus in a plurality of loci thus has an ontological relationship or “state” superimposed upon it for each locus it interacts with.³ Embedded in reality, a locus also exists with regard to every other locus in reality, and therefore bears a sum-of-all-states that changes as its relationships change.

Time and Determinacy

6. Time is considered here to be a unit of absolute change: the change in reality with respect to itself that constantly occurs, turning the undetermined future into the determined present. As time marches on, possibilities and potentials continually coalesce into determinate reality.

Processing

7. Processing is used here to mean the deterministic computation of ontological state, whether it is manifested as electrical, mechanical, thermal, chemical, quantum, or otherwise; i.e., processing is deterministic change in a locus due to interaction with another locus or loci, altering its sum-of-states so that it has a different effect on another locus in a subsequent interaction.

8. To the extent that as a thing obeys deterministic rules, it has computational potential, as the input and/or as the processor, modifying states of real loci in a domain of interaction according to its nature and circumstances.

9. Reality, being absolutely true in itself, contains only quantities and qualities defined with respect to itself that do not self-contradict and that have been coalesced by the march of time. Being thus determined, reality can process itself deterministically. All real loci with fixed qualities can function as deterministic logic gates of sorts, reacting completely consistently in response to consistent inputs.

10. The deterministic characteristics of reality enable reality to consistently exist, be consistently observed, and consistently processed. Reality is cognisable insofar as it functions as observer and observed deterministically, and can make sense to itself insofar as it exists without arbitrary qualities.

Determinism’s Role in Cognition

11. Correct perception depends on the deterministic conveyance of information from object to subject. For example, when a tree falls in a forest and a crash is heard, the impact imparts the air with periodic waves of compression and rarefaction that diffuse outward until they strike the eardrum, upon which the waves are transmitted through the acoustic mechanism of the inner ear until the vibrations are encoded by cochlear hair cells as electrical pulses, which are conveyed to the brain via the auditory nerve. The transfer of information is only possible because each element involved behaves according to its determinate nature, releasing and absorbing mechanical and electrical pressure from its neighbours, to its neighbours.

12. In the preceding example, the sound waves that impinge on the eardrum convey information on not only the size and shape of the tree, but also on the wind and surroundings (much of the sound is reflected off objects before reaching the ear, and then reflected by the pinnae), and factors below the limit of perception such as temperature and humidity. The simple deterministic reactions of atoms express the nature of their surroundings—and the information is only correct because it was propagated deterministically.

13. Insofar as the cognitive locus into which the information is conveyed is composed of real matter, its nature and characteristics are determinate and must therefore process the information deterministically.⁴ In the brain, which is made of similar neurons to those that transmit sensations with more or less fidelity from the mechanical, auditory, visual, olfactory, thermal, and other receptors, ATP is used to drive a delicate molecular mechanism to generate the action potentials that neurons convey information with. Insofar as each pulse is generated in a clean chain of causality, it can convey a tiny aspect of the immersive ocean of information that reality offers.

14. In this sense, truth is not so much a quality contained in words can correspond with reality, but the identity of reality that can be captured in thought and described with words or other means to potentially trigger a corresponding connection of insight in another subject.

Real Computation’s Role in Life

15. The stupendous processing power of reality is harnessed by life to transport entropy; to execute molecular, cellular, organismic, and ecological processes; to perceive the world, make sense of it, act upon it, and observe the results; and perhaps to transform and elevate itself.

17. Life is recognised here as that peculiar species of charge that polarises matter into living structures, much like a magnet causes iron filings to align.⁵ Being a charge, it persists as long as entropy is transported to sustain it. In this sense life is immortal, the temporary nature of most of its containers notwithstanding.

18. The extreme precision and consistency of living processes is evident in the forms of creatures such as the horseshoe crab, which has survived with only minor morphological changes since the Palaeozoic era. For an estimated hundreds of millions of years, life, in these humble crabs, has arranged each atom and molecule they ever metabolized in just the right arrangement to sustain itself and faithfully replicate their DNA over the long ages.

    Concluding Thoughts

    Processing of information is not a function of living things per se, but of the substrate they are composed of. Each constituent locus and meta-locus is a computational agent and the informational processing capacity of life on an individual and collective basis is only limited by its coherence.

    Though reality itself is the only agent in any system that observes, contemplates, acts, and feeds back, self-referential existence allows identity and subjectivity to be distributed throughout it.

    Artificial intelligence processes symbols that can only gain truth and meaning when they are reinput into the noosphere, making it no match for real intelligence—though as most of life’s processing power is spent on its core functions of metabolism and reproduction, the former can outshine it in the narrow playing field of symbol manipulation.

Horseshoe Crabs by Heinrich Harder c. 1916

1. Hypothetical other “realities” or existences are definitionally part of a singular overarching reality or uni-verse if they are real. In this essay, I proceed from unity to maintain some coherence and rigor.

2. Existence is used here for simplicity as it is a hyperdimensional measure containing all coordinate systems. The self-referential nature of existence is stressed to answer Einstein’s question of whether the moon exists if one does not look at it. Contrary to the beliefs of some 20th-century physicists, it is probability that does not exist.

3. Subjectively, this state may take the form of the result of a physical, chemical, electrical, magnetic, optical, thermal, and/or other interaction.

4. That which is real has already gone through the process of determination due to the passage of time as described in paragraph 6, and therefore has been stripped of indeterminate characteristics.

5. Gilbert Ling describes this phenomenon in this paper among others.