Omar Claflin

As discussed previously, our intelligence relies on feature extraction and abstraction. This is also true of our language or any of our systems of representation or understanding. We break down the real world into features and categories.

This works within scopes. We do this with language, at the detailed and abstract resolutions. We also do this in our neurons as previously described with vision (from lines to shapes to faces to crowds). We find patterns that work at different scopes or orders of magnitude. Of course, bringing some of these patterns or features to other resolutions may not work. Although we may attempt it.

A sound can be loud. A line not so much. But a color can be.

Pattern identification works in layers extracting out the features in a serial sequence. These pattern-extracted features also called invariants because they represent things unchanging (unvarying) such as a line. A line of a doorframe, the edge of a television, a sidewalk is the invariant feature extracted by your intelligence system. As discussed before, higher invariants (more abstract) such as shapes (squares, triangles, etc) recognize patterns in these lower invariants. As stated before, this is a feature of pattern-extraction that works in layers.

Interestingly, patterns can be extracted from multiple inputs. In other words, similar patterns or concepts found in visual and auditory inputs can be identified and associated. Colors and sounds can be choppy or smooth.

Sometimes this association is fairly coherent and useful such as the visual representation of music or language (visual lines patterns that are associated with the structure of sound patterns).

Synesthesia is a phenomena that some people have where they may see colors in the letters of words or see colors when they hear sounds. It’s an association of senses that some people experience. We all have a degree of it. When psychologists present a sharp pointy star shape and a blob rounded shape and give people two nonsense words (‘kiki’ and ‘bouba’), nearly 98% of people choose ‘kiki’ for the sharp one. This presumably demonstrates some kind of innate visual-auditory association most of us have. These associations of sensation may occur because the pieces of cortex are physically neighboring (in the more obvious examples) or a routing of our sensory information through more global association hubs such as the parietal lobe of our brains.

Some level of this concept could be extended to more everyday experiences. Such as our processing of smell sometimes carrying an associative sensation of taste. Or any of our perceptions carrying an associative feeling or emotion. All the inputs coming into our mind, whether its sight, smell, pain, temperature, balance, hunger or trepidation, are extracted for patterns and meta-patterns.

This recursive meta-pattern extraction, this grand attempt to generalize patterns could be thought of as a neural drive towards a grand invariant. Not exactly what it’s doing but it’s a summarizing narrative that works.

Pattern identification operates on even the highest abstract invariants or features of your brain. In other words, not just senses or low level shapes and colors but also on associated concepts.

You may notice similar patterns of human behavior in disparate fields, various stages of life or different parts of the world. You may notice similar patterns in your own ruminating thoughts. You may notice similar patterns in the way I write sentences.

This flexibility to generalize from disparate contexts is a strength of our intelligence. Until it’s misused or is carried too far. Examples of superficial pattern extraction such as word association (Chapter 5) or over-generalization of features such as philosophical language (Chapter 7) were covered already. I wanted to cover one more hiccup in our cognition which is our ability or inability to deal with scope.

Scope gives us context for these recognized patterns. It tells us that these patterns are relatively valid at some resolution or in some situation. Sometimes, as a leap forward in our intelligence, we recognize that the same pattern exists for multiple situations or at multiple resolutions.

Gravity, its mass attracting description as well as its more comprehensive description in the equations, works to describe what will happen to a dropped piece of cheese, describes how we stay on a spinning Earth, describes the planet itself including its orbit around the Sun and why it’s spherical and how the Milky Way galaxy of 400 billion stars spins around one supermassive black hole. This procession describing the effect of gravity on a cube of cheese to the Milky Way involves about 22 orders of magnitude.

One order of magnitude is a procession from one to ten of something. So that if I think I need six pages to explain something but end up needing sixty, I was off by an entire order of magnitude. Six hundred pages would be two orders of magnitude.

A year, a decade and a century are each one order of magnitude apart.

It can be hard to think about many orders of magnitude. Our minds limited by the experiences filtered through our minds bases its intuition on the somewhat limited scope of our sensory range. Keep in mind that a one ounce weight or hundred pounds on your palm is only a difference of three orders of magnitude. A thousand pounds would be four orders of magnitude. Any weight outside this range, the sensors on your hand, would either completely miss or be completely overwhelmed. The range on your hand for sensing weight is then about three to four orders of magnitude.

Hearing, being an incredibly sophisticated biological sensor, has a greater range of approximately nine orders of magnitude between the faintest whisper it can detect and to the deafening sound level of standing next to a jet engine.

My point is that things don’t just emerge or appear suddenly. Your zoom is just too far out. This is a critical point when it comes to genuine confusion people have over concepts of emergence. How thought emerges from billion neurons. How complex biological design emerges from a billion years. How a societal movement emerges from a population.

These things suddenly manifesting has more to do with your resolution or scope rather than explanations involving divinity or autonomy. Discontinuities, another conflated concept borrowed by the new-ageists as evidence for ‘unexplained jumps,’ is similarly explained by failure of scope.

Similarly, blowing concepts out of proportion is carrying it past relative or realistic scope. Untouchable divinity is a concept of order or caution blown out of proportion. Or consider the concept of infinity, taken as a process or event operating well past the window of time or window of space we’re looking at. A process or event that may be one or two orders of magnitude larger than whatever we’re addressing. Perhaps fifty orders of magnitude. Or fifty thousand. Or some finite number.

Consider the example I gave about the philosophy of physics problem (Chapter 7) where they were attempt to divide by infinity. They were assuming discreteness could be broken down forever. Literally forever. My point isn’t to introduce what I hope isn’t an original concept or solve anything in physics or math. My point was about their mode of thinking and the limitations. They ran into their problems of trying to segment space and time by assuming it could be divided infinitely. Infinity, from a certain point of view, may be seen as a lazy rounding concept. Because in actuality, nothing extends for infinity. The machine will fail. You will have to sleep. The sun will explode. Protons will decay.  

In the context of the universe, it may turn out that quantities as small as 10^-128 (128 orders of magnitude) are the offset between two nearly equal and opposing quantities that manifest as everything around us. 1/0 where zero may not actually be zero. Infinity may not actually be infinity. It hard to see or imagine beyond several orders of magnitude. Sensors of the highest design, including our ears and eyes, can sense things of a range of about nine orders of magnitude. In this example, the difficulty lies in comprehending the billion-fold difference between the faintest and the most intense light or sound we can handle. Of course your brain handles the input from your sensors beyond your awareness but consciously grasping this scope requires a metaphor.

Consider an eraser in a small carton holding ten erasers. Now consider ten cartons laid in a row on the bottom of a box. Now, take out ninety more cartons and lay them on the bottom of this box ten cartons deep to the back of this box. You have a hundred cartons laid on the bottom of this big box.

Now stack this ten layers of cartons stacked up to the lip of the box. Seal that box up and now do this with nine more boxes and lay them on the bottom of a shipping crate. Stacked ten high. Stacked ten deep. Tired yet? We’re at seven orders of magnitude in this imagination exercise. We’d have to lay ten of these shipping crates side-by-side and ten deep to call it a day at a billion erasers. Or nine orders of magnitude.

Higher order objects and concepts are rounding concepts. Hundreds of billions of molecules, all acting the same way more or less. Let’s not simulate them all, we decide. Let’s just pretend they act as one fluidic monolith. We do this constantly in our disciplines or thinking. We set things aside or generalize when large numbers are involved. Discussions of culture doesn’t take on the form of trying to simulate a million individual psychologies. But obviously, these general pictures are missing details of resolutions that are above or below it.

Emergence, the idea that a complex capability ‘pops’ out of a collection of simpler parts. These concepts have a deliberate evasion of depth because the robustness of the explanatory narrative is lacking. The broad level description of human culture might fail in certain ways in describing an individual just as our rough descriptives about brains fail when looking for the neurons responsible for our sense of humor. Explanatory narratives can fail at the wrong scope. Shipping crates on the outside, erasers on the inside; giant heavy metal objects that are actually mostly empty space and rubber.

I’m not bashing the usefulness of high-order summaries. There are great things harvested from meta-patterns and scope-jumping such as creative analogy. Layered patterns that are found to be consistent across context can be useful for metaphorical explanation or thinking by metaphor.

How can people hold several systems of understanding in non-conflict? Because our brains do that. Explanations of systems at different resolution is part of our descriptive capability.

At multiple levels, these patterns have value. Biochemistry, social circles of friends, culture, are so many orders of magnitude apart, it doesn’t matter. If they do collide, it may not even be conscious. Unlike your computer which may bluescreen at an error, our mind is incredibly resilient at ignoring the breaks. 

Your visual picture of the setting around you right now would be a jumpy, spotty, focal point of clarity surrounded by a giant blur if not for this feature. Your eyes only capable of producing focused images of objects that it’s looking at directly. Your eyes jump around to hotspots in your environment or on the page, filling the in rest. Your mind remembers the details from when you last looked around the environment around you and constructs a visual picture using the higher resolution but outdated details.

Not only does your brain do this with space but it does this with time as well. You are not the perfectly continuous inputting machine you may think, experiencing every single moment with perfect continuity. This discontinuity in time is more apparent on certain recreational drugs or medications or for ultra-marathoners and fatigued drivers who micro-sleep without being aware of it. Your brain combines a ton of details about the environment around you to make a best guess about how much time has passed. Your sense of continuity and presence is not required for your functioning. Your sense of presence isn’t even that accurate.

Similar examples of smoothing over these breaks occur in people who have a split brain, as mentioned in a previous chapter, where upon unconsciously receiving conflicting information, the brain will combine the information it has and generate a conflated narrative, the best it can, to smooth over the inconsistencies. It takes on the scope it is able to handle. It strives to paint coherent and consistent explanations. This should be an example of how the brain’s narratives can’t be automatically trusted and how a constant doubt is healthy. A ‘knowing’ that you don’t know.  Basically, knowing that your mind is a master at the self-protective narrative.

Not me, you’re thinking to yourself. I’m pretty hard on myself.

Yeah. That’s the self-protective narrative. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Working in the background, ready to do a backflip in narrative structure in a heartbeat, smoothing over the cracks before you even notice.

In this case, the hard-on-yourself sense of self-identity ensures any critical thoughts you do have can be taken with that grain of salt. That your thoughts are unfairly biased to be self-hypercritical. Like I said, self-protective.

But back to scope jumping and pattern summaries. A lot of formalized philosophical argument seems to stem from some desperate grasping for the axiomatic or absolute. Ironically, they have codified statements about the folly of absolute premises but carry a cognitive dissonance about this when attacking other positions, philosophical or not, on theirlack of absolutes or absolutely defensible axioms. (i.e. Religious philosophy attacking other explanations as lacking any absolute moral valuation. Scientific philosophy attacking others as lacking an absolute objectivity.)

A proto-concept is given heavy credibility in terms of its coherence as an idea because on its own, in a vacuum, it doesn’t completely self-collapse. The coherence of this idea is assumed to hold up in context, the jump smoothed over by cognitive dissonance. Additionally, a representational idea or metaphorical concept is implied to have real existence in some etheral dimension. Conflation of concepts and invented realities follow. Invented realities that aren’t being implied as just metaphor.

Similar thought patterns resulted in actual good luck faeries, actual embodied souls, or actual psychological energy projections. Projections of our metaphors carries the same pseudo-existence and power-of-language-shaping-reality as the old idea of arcane magic.

We have explanatory ideas that remain coherent on multiple scopes while giving us predictive and evaluating capability that negate the need for these.

It’s such a bizarre series of thought traps to fall into from the self-proclaimed academic ancestors claiming to have developed the natural sciences approach. This pattern of seeking grand invariants and inventing them when they cannot be found is a pattern that occurs in human thinking in general. They’ve falsely innoculated themselves against cognitive dissonance by surrounding themselves with labeled critical thinking processes, but then continue to fall into some really bizarre thinking. It tries to serve as a priesthood of thinking which has led to some bizarre consequences. As any priesthood will do.

Out tendency to look for an absolute is just a drive for informational concentration, the ultimate pattern condensation explaining everything. But these information concentrating drives of ours, as noble as they may be, can be horrifyingly inaccurate when we start cutting through orders of magnitude. Generalizing about scope far greater or smaller than where we are at. Predicting human psychologies in the skies above or assuming empathy for the molecules below. Patching over our discontinuous, falsely volitional sense of experience over our own fingertips and vocal chords, our self-protective mental narratives assume we can extend this to the world around us. Not to say your presence won’t have any impact. But it may not have the volitional impact you think nor the continuous experience you assume. The limit of your personal scope can’t even predict or control yourself, much less the world around. The tendency to need a pedestal of absolute or to need a boundary condition, true of formalized philosophy, theology or new-age spiritualism, is that without an absolute, you would be adrift.

Be adrift. So what? Emergence, infinity and other shortcuts of cognitive dissonance, are at best approximations. They were the vaguest common describing pattern we could extract from the environment around us. This is a feature of intelligent systems. Recognize it for what it is. Even mathematical systems have axiomatic Achilles heels (proven, as a matter of fact, mathematically). Don’t lose yourself in it. Don’t bash your head against the limits of it or treat the boundary like a Neolithic tribe stuck on an island treating the sea as some kind of ultimate boundary. Realize its non-infiniteness and its impermanence. Work on being aware the limits in the resolution of our perspective. We should strive to accurately identify the scope of our various cognitive abilities so that we don’t misapply them to resolutions of coarseness or sophistication that don’t work. The scope of our codified knowledge, your intuition, or the bounds on our species intelligence are not permanent either. Our potential is likely not infinite but it almost definitely goes beyond the scope of our current perspective. So, close enough.

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