ADAPTIVE REPRESENTATIONAL NETWORKS
ARE THE YOU IN YOU

In “The Origin of Minds”, we read about how a personality or “self” evolved in time.

From p. 66: “The next time you feel cold... your intelligence system will access any adaptive representational network that has a ‘physiological sense of being cold [internal state]’ component and match your current environment and stimulus with one from your past that had a successful outcome.” From this rummaging around to find successful adaptations, we chose an appropriate behavior for getting warm. [I must ask here, What if someone had few successful outcomes in her life? Is this how some of us become self-destructive? When the whole system is malfunctioning?]

From p. 69: “A memory is not a photograph. It is, in a sense, a revisiting of a moment in your life that captures not only the scene but also the significance of the participants’ relationships, their internal states, and the outcome of their behavior. It [a memory] is the activation of our adaptive representational network.”

From p. 70: “There is nothing arbitrary about the circumstances in which these representations were formed by the way. They had utility at that moment.... Nothing gets into the club of adaptive representational networks unless it follows the rules: An external stimulus and/or an internal state change provokes a behavior with an outcome that shifts your state, your feelings. That is what is memorable.” These memorable scenes are deeply entrenched—they are bits of yourself, they are pieces of memory from which you strung together the self that you call “you”. This connection between necessity and memory also explains why memories are closely linked with emotions.

From p. 71: A prototype is the vertical dimension of ‘representations’ [ARNs]. Imagine all the dolls you’ve experienced in your life. “This composite sense of dollness is a higher order representation. A prototype. Doll essence.” Prototypes are adaptive constructions which, when we meet new things in our environment, help us explore them. They might also obstruct our adaptations if we cling to old prototypes too tightly.

From p. 72: We human animals also develop prototypes for our “selves”. “Something... happens when we act as agents in a year’s worth of transactions in the biological marketplace. A higher level of abstraction [a prototype] of who we are—our social signatures—emerges.”


SPEAKING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Stephen Pinker in “Blank Slate” notes an obvious fact about consciousness. The coming of the computer was parallel or precedent to the emerging into consciousness of the idea of “the computational theory of mind.” Each new level of historical consciousness can “look back” and understand what has come before, says Pinker.

I say that if this is so, then, Freud could see back to the unconscious (instinctual) structure that underlay consciousness. He was wrong about so much, yet he was a pioneer. Freud’s greatest gift to intellectual life was ‘they know not what they do” at a much more true level than Christ himself who also said it. Christ blindly thought that the material world was acting against the spiritual world. Christ sensed the underlying structure of brain chemistry but missed the real truth, but Freud knew it when he uncovered the unconscious. Now we who come later can actually understand it.
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"Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable." —Plato
"Plato is a bore." —Nietzsche