Questions to Ponder

Questions to ponder after reading of Cognition and Reality, The Quest for Consciousness, and The Feeling of What Happens.

• How does it happen that different people notice different aspects of the same situation?
• Why are some potions of the retinal input treated as belonging to the same object, others as independent?
  • May it have something to do with results of co-occurrence analysis?
• Why do we often seem to perceive the meanings of events rather than their detectable surface features?
• How are successive glances at the same scene "integrated"?
• Why is perceiving almost always accurate, given inadequacies of the retinal image?
• If percepts are constructed, why are they usually accurate?
• What kind of cognitive structure does perception require?
• What happens when we choose what to see and how do we learn to see better?
• How are illusions and errors possible if perception is simply the pickup of information that is already available and specific?
• How do we pickup unanticipated information?
• What happens when a new object enters the field of view for the first time?
• How is it decided whether to use an existing schema or to develop a new one (exploitation vs. exploration)?
• How can anything at all be seen in a brief flash if perception is a temporally extended activity?
• How is schema modified by new information? What elements of it are being modified? Anticipation? Motor program?
• Is development of the schema from the general to the specific, from undifferentiated to precise or in the opposite direction?
• Why do introspective reports suggest that the meaning is available first, and the stimulus details only later or not at all?
  • This is probably because introspection starts from the highest level schema of all active schemata
• How does schema come to exist?
  • Some may be innate, but for those that are not, what's the mechanism? Co-occurrence?
  • The perceptual cycle must occur before it can develop
• Can we perceive something not having an appropriate schema?
  • Maybe only at the lowest possible level, which will allow for bootstrapping based on some mechanism, like co-occurrence.
• Which schema develops earlier: the more complex "high-level" one, or the more simple "low-level" schema? (for example, shape vs. smile)
• How do schemata get co-activated? When they are related? Include one another? Not related?
• Does a schema for a concept (for example, "number") get easier and faster activated than a schema for an object that is part of that category (for example, number "five")? How do they influence each other?
• Is it possible to deploy more than one schema at a time?
  • Yes, multiple schemata can be active, even though they have different level of activation (and influence of other schemata); based on that level of activation they compete with other schemata for resources (gaze, effectors, and so on)
• What does presence of expected/unexpected information in the environment does to the schema? In terms of activation? In terms of its modification?
• Why is it difficult to pick up information from two different messages/streams at the same time?
• Is it possible to attend to two things at once?
• What are the limits of automatic mental activity?
• Why/how does perception depend on a skill? What skill is that?
  • Motor program that supports co-activation of other programs...
• Are schemata being influenced (activated/modified) by unattended information?
• Is there a single mechanism responsible for our cognitive limitations? What are the limitations? (The Magical Number Seven)
• What types of conflicts may arise from activation of two schemata? How do those conflicts get resolved/arbitrated?
• Is there some impediment to the parallel development of independent, but similar schemata? Does existing schema "canalize" incoming information and experience effectively preventing the second (similar) schema to be formed?
• Is consciousness an aspect of activity or an independently definable mechanism?
• Is it possible to think without being conscious?
• How does the subject know whether the present content of his consciousness originated with an external stimulus?
• Does imagery appear when pickup of information is delayed or interrupted?
• If images are anticipations rather than pictures, what's going on when we describe them?
• How can we imagine things we don't expect, for example, things we know cannot happen?
  • Anticipations concern things that only might come to pass rather than those things whose existence is already established
• How does detachment of images from the immediate context come about?
  • This detachment occurs inevitably in at least one situation with which we are all familiar: locomotion
  • Any delay between the anticipation and the pickup creates a state of unfulfilled perceptual readiness, and the inner aspect of that active shema is a mental image
• How are cognitive maps (and other types of schemata) acquired?
• What sorts of information do they incorporate at various stages in their development?
• How are they altered by experience?
• Under what conditions are they forgotten?
• Where many schemata exist, what distinguishes the right one?
• How schemata stored in memory? What represents long-term memory?
  • Repeated representation of the same material constitute a regularity to be detected
  • Use of schemata accounts for remembering
  • Forgetting occurs whenever the present inputis not specific enough to select a schema unequivocally
• What's the difference between perception and imagery?
  • Perception is a cyclic activity that includes an anticipatory phase; imagery is anticipation occurring alone
• What schemata are we born with? Schemata sensitive to expressions of emotion? Intentions?
• How words come to refer to objects?
  • Is it required to be "engaged in two perceptual cycles at once"? (Cognition and Reality, p.164)
  • Are those words embedded in the schema or related to/associated with it?
• What is the principal function of grammatical structure of a sentence?
  • Is it to help the listener to develop proper anticipations that may span many seconds? (Ibid, p.167)
• How does one describe what one sees?
• Why do we feel that we know what we're going to say, but only in some general way?
• How does anticipations get detached from the stimulus information that generated them to become things we imagine?
• Who has more freedom in their actions: adult or infant?
• How do we perceive emotion of feeling in others?
  • Perceiver needs to have schemata to pick this information up
  • How much do these schemata depend on social experience?
• Why do we (sometimes) hear multiple voices arguing?
• How is anticipated image formed? What specifically is being anticipated (out of many possibilities)?
• How is movie-in-the-brain generated? How does the brain generate the sense of an owner and observer for that movie?
• What's the relationship between consciousness and emotion? (Emotion And Consciousness)
• Are there any non-conscious feelings? Are we conscious of all our emotions and feelings?
• What distinguishes emotion from feeling?
  • Emotions are external indication of feelings
  • Emotions are experienced as feelings
  • Emotions play signaling role; feelings facilitate learning and motivate behavior (on a larger scale) or produce a specific behavior (on a smaller scale) like freezing
    • "[Pleasure] is related to the clever anticipation of what can be done not to have a problem." "[Nature] seduces us into good behavior." (The Feeling of What Happens, p.78)
  • Expression of emotion drives feeling, which in turn supports expression of emotion; chicken and egg
• Can we control/suppress emotions/feelings?
• Why do we need to be conscious to have feelings or express emotions?
• What's the difference between sensing pain and knowing you have pain?
• What distinguishes zombies from normal (non-zombie) organisms? Automatism? Lack of intentions? Lack of continuity of purpose? Always-on learning (zombie learning)?
• What are the properties of consciousness?
  • William James (cf. The Feeling of What Happens, p.126): it's personal, selective, continuous, and pertains to objects rather than itself
• Why is there significant delay (up to 500ms; Libet's experiments) between registering of a sensation and conscious experience of it?
• How does always changing mind preserve its identity? What is is that provides mind with this core that is always the same? Is "self" a concept as any other concept and is built based on interactions with other individuals (culture and meme links)?