Tuesday, 5 March 2024
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In the fifth chapter, we dive further into 'concepts'. What they contain, how they are constructed, and ultimately how they help the brain to regulate the body's resources.

I'd say just as there's two general ways to keep your personal finances healthy, the first being to increase your income, and the second being decreasing spending. This can be applied to your body, like you can eat food to increase energy, and limit movement to save energy. Though the body can also budget like divert attention from digestion to muscles to prepare for danger. Under those general ways there are many ways to regulate like there is to earn and save money.

Before I talk of concepts, I'd also like to write about our senses or sensory input and how I sort them on a high level. First, I make a distinction between tangible and intangible senses. The tangible are the physical senses that I further distinct as outer-body senses and inner-body senses. Outer-body senses are senses that feels as interaction with the outer world (touch, noise, smell, taste). Inner-body senses are senses that feels as an interaction within our body (internal touch (like pressure on nerves), internal movements (like heartbeat, respiration, digestion)). There are many more senses within those groups, this is just to help us make a high level mapping to build around. I also want to specify the mapping is made in the context how we experience the origination of the senses in our consciousness. This was the tangible senses.

Now into the more mystical, abstract senses that I call the intangible senses. But to understand those, don't think of a sense as the experience of it only, but more as an information type. The intangible senses I make up of two things (note the distinction between them is not like hot vs. cold, they are more different from each other). The first is affect sense. This is an intangible sense or intangible information type (meta sense or metadata). It is applied to tangible senses and the second intangible sense to better quantify its significance for predictions that direct or indirectly affect body resource regulation. The second intangible sense I call the concept sense. The concept sense is our own construction of information types. This is a sort of sense or information that is only an abstraction, that is built firstly up by tangible senses, but they can also be built up by concepts themselves. resulting in more abstract concepts. In the prediction loop, this is what the experience is that is used with the tangible senses received to make predictions. I'd say concepts serve two purposes here, but ultimately they both serve to improve prediction for regulating body resources. The first is to combine tangible senses together in a useful way to improve our prediction by finding patterns of how all tangible senses can group together or emerge in specific time periods that we receive throughout our life. To give an example, it could be that an instance of fear based emotion, that makes your body expend more resources, but is deemed necessary, as that emotion concept was predicted/instantiated by probability from other less abstract variations of concepts that were predicted/instantiated by probability from tangible senses input. I'll represent the concepts as a sentence. "You are walking on a road that is in an area highly populated with snaked. These snakes are venomous and you don't have any antidote with you. It is sunny outside and that means more snakes can be on the road." In this example, this is what you may rationalise consciously for your reason of fear, but your brain doesn't end up predicting fear from that, like in instant of snake predicted on ground, your brain predicts more aroused fear concept to engage body before your conscious simulation of it that is matched with reality later, you back away instinctively before being conscious of doing so. The concept are stored in a quantifiable way for your brain to predict these concepts by probability. I'm not explaining that too clearly, but you can see it as a layer on top of current tangible senses to improve body resource regulation by adding context to current environment / tangible senses, like this is dangerous place, increase alertness, or that is an immediate danger, engage full panic response. About the emotion of fear, it is a highly abstract concept, that serves to contain a bunch of things that explains to the body how to be cautious and prepared for danger in this specific context. All concepts vary dependent on context, like imagine 'fish' in grocery store and 'fish' in pet store, and there are many more dimensions to this variation. The second purpose of concepts is to improve social function, which is why shared concepts are important, like that we know what money is, what a job interview is, social norms and so on. That you can predict other humans' concepts, mental inference, what they feel and think.

While talking of senses I started going into concepts. I think you can also view concepts in the brain as a massive multidimensional mindmap/brainstorm/graph that is ever changing. Concepts have different levels of abstraction, the more tangible concepts contain a lot of tangible senses, like the concepts of physical objects, like a house or tree (houses and trees have lots of variations, usually you have a prototype of the object, the first you think of, but this changes on from which function the object is called from, you have different prototype of a fish in a pet store and in a grocery store, you can see how complex concepts truly are, your imagination is truly the limit here). Concepts is why we dissect the world into objects, like chair and table, as it is a good way to make sense of the world. But this means that we lose perception of the fluidity of reality. The brain categorise reality to do this, and as it categorises reality into concepts, categorises concepts into more abstraction, the more your brain becomes biased to receive the world in that categorised and abstracted way your brain has been wired.

Words are an abstraction, the language and its words will influence how you abstract reality. The brain constructing concepts starts first from as an infant, by brain categorising the tangible senses, raw noise by patterns such as how syllabes comes together in words. After first year I think, you only hear the most precise differences in sound of the language you heard in that time, your reality is now biased to hearing that language(s). From you are born or from womb, your brain sees tangible senses more noisy or not dissected. It finds patterns in the noise, called 'statistical learning', then perceives reality with newly found patterns, and so on finds patterns on top of that, with ultimate purpose to make sense of reality, that includes the social reality, to regulate body resources / staying alive.

This is my rough attempt of making sense of this chapter. Note this modelling or way of seeing it was heavily my own interpretation from what I read to help myself understand, but I hope it made some sense. I found the chapter fascinating and the concepts you make to understand the book, from each previous chapter gets richer and richer. It also made lots of sense relating to personal experience that I'll write a little about tomorrow I think.