Definitions From the video:
Attention: The conscious process of comparing observations to expectations
Expectations: Conscious awareness of pattern matching
Definitions mentioned in the video:
Consciousness: The ability to experience and remember pain and pleasure
Learning: Efficiently encoding responses to stimuli
Emotion: Experience caused by a difference between observations and expectations
Transcript:
On definitionMining.com I wrote that “communication is an attempt to achieve the same experience without the same observations”, and I’ve been thinking about what that means to me, and how definitions can help describe my what I’m experiencing.
All the information that creates that our conscious experiences originally started out as electrical signals traveling on neurons up in to our brains. And once the information gets to our brain it’s processed in lots of different ways, but the eventual result is signals traveling the other way, out of brains and in to our bodies, and that’s what causes our actions.
Our brains are networks that takes in inputs on some nerves, makes lots of connections and generates outputs on some other nerves. A lot of this processing we can think of as a kind “pattern matching” or learning. Some parts of the network have learned to recognize some patterns and respond with particular outputs in those situations.
And also, somewhere in our brains we obviously have consciousness, all the information from our senses is combined together and it feeds in to our conscious experience. Let’s call that stream of information “observations”.
Then there’s other kinds of information that our brain creates that we’re conscious of too, besides observation. I’ve used the term “expectations” in a few definitions, and that’s an important part of what we’re aware of.
For example, if I reach out to pick up a glass, before I touch it, I’m aware of some expectations I have – how it’ll feel or what the ice clinking will sound like. That’s information that the pattern matching in my brain creates in response to what I’m observing. And I think that’s a good definition of what “expectations” are – they’re the conscious experience of pattern matching.
So, what else is there that I’m conscious of? Maybe things like memory or imagination?
But both memory and imagination feel like different kinds of expectations to me though. The expectations I have when I’m about to pick up a glass feel the same as I tried to remember of what it was like the last time I picked up a glass, and it feels the same as if I were imagining it instead. All three of these have the same kind of feeling to me, even though they’re caused by different things, so I’m going to group them up and just call them all “expectations”, they’re all different ways of being conscious of different kinds of pattern matching happening in my brain.
So, we have our stream of observations and we have another with our expectations, and we should also include emotions. I wrote that emotions are caused by changes in our expectations. And we can see how that would happen in our consciousness, with these two streams of information. If we compare them, and our expectations are different than reality, we’ll have to change our expectations, and maybe that will make us happy or sad or just surprised, and I could see how changing expectations could create lots of different emotions.
And, what should we call this whole comparison process? To me the word that describes it best is “attention” – It’s the process of focusing on one part of what I’m observing, and I’m trying to find new information there. How do I do that? By seeing how it’s different than what I expected. If there’s not much difference between my observations and my expectations I might need to look very closely to find something new, or if my expectations were vague I might not spot the difference right away. But I feel like that’s what we mean when we say we’re “paying attention” to something, we’re making this kind of comparison.
And maybe this causes me to make a choice, and that leads to an output. Or another possibility seems to be that as my expectations in this moment change, that they can then become part of my expectations in the next moment. We could think of this looping back as “short term memory” or “working memory”, it lets us take another look at our expectations as they’re changing, to see if they’re a better fit now.
Of course we already have one feedback loop we can use to learn and update our expectations. When we do anything it causes a change in the world that we can observe, and so our choices and actions are creating new feedback and new observations and new expectations. But that’s a relatively long and slow process of guessing and checking if we’re looking for a complicated pattern or meaning.
This conscious loop provides a similar kind of feedback, but it’s faster because we can check and update our expectations very quickly, without waiting for changes in the real world. It’s a quick way to create new expectations and check to see if they make sense before we act on them.
And if this lets us make the same kinds of good choices over and over again, then hopefully those patterns of inputs and outputs will start to get wired in to our brain, we’ll start to learn how to react to a new situations or a new pattern and over time we won’t have to think about, or pay close attention to that kind of situation anymore. Which is what it feels like to learn something new.
And really, that’s what I’m trying to do with these definitions, I’m trying to figure out how I experience the world and and these definitions are patterns I’ve found by focusing on some piece of information over and over again until something clicked.
And if they’re useful and I keep using them, maybe it’ll change the way I think about things, these new patterns will get wired in to my brain.
And now I’m trying them out in this bigger feedback loop too, I’m hoping you’ll find them useful too, and we can see what kinds of changes and feedback they’ll generate, so hopefully we can all understand everything a little better.