RE: [-empyre-] Accidents (was for example)

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

We have memories of roses, but presumably this doesn't necessitate having a
real rose in the brain. Instead, the brain stores representations of things
and ideas and relations, etc.

How could it be any other way? One imagines early physicians opening up the
brain and being perhaps puzzled but relieved to discover that they did not
find little men inside the head or a well-ordered collection of tiny tiny
roses, one for each memory of a rose. They may then have mused on the
mysterious connection between our other ways of representing data and the
brain's way of representing things. Like writing and painting and so on.

The brain operates on representations, processes representations.

Even when we 'see' something (with our eyes open), it is a representation
that our minds have already done processing on. We are about 60 Hz
(processing cycles per second), but the processing would seem to be
distributed quite widely. The brain processes representations. The amount of
information in the word 'rose' is just four bytes worth, 32 bits. Whereas an
actual rose, well, one could think of it in a kind of atomic bitmap sense
where each constituent of matter is coded, but there wouldn't actually be
that much information required to code a rose because it is quite patterned.
The more pattern there is in a message, the less information required to
create a representation of it.

The brain creates representations of things. The data streams of our moment
to moment perception can be 'replayed', to some extent, depending on the
intensity and detail of our memory of it and so on.

When we read text, we bring to the task an impressive volume of processing
algorithms to parse and interpret the text even to the point where we
sometimes create a silent voice in the mind. The process of reading text
would be related to the process also of 'reading' images or sounds: again,
we bring quite marvelous processing algorithms to these tasks. How could it
be any other way?

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ja?