Page 52 - Deep Learning

The Nature of the Enterprise 35

Subjective
Experiences

Process (representation) Actions

Utterances
Figure 2.1. The application of cognitive processes to representations generates three
streams of events to be explained by a general cognitive theory.

(discourse). Applied to a paper map (another representation) some of the
same processes can be used to guide myself around an unfamiliar city. The
main point is that the three streams of subjective experiences, actions and
utterances are produced by cognitive processes that operate on the person’s
stock of representations.
The parts of the mind thus turn out to be dynamic entities – processes –
rather than things. In this respect, the mind is more like the weather than like
a clock or a kidney. This explains why mind has an ethereal quality. Every state
of mind exists only long enough to transition into the next state of mind.

The Necessity of Control
At any one point in time, multiple processes are happening in a person’s
mind: The focus of attention moves continuously from one point in the envi-
ronment to another, perceptual representations are created anew for every shift
in attention, what is seen and heard serve as reminders of information stored
in memory, recalled memories trigger reflections or choices among options
and so on. How are these multitudinous processes coordinated? Although
neuroscientists have been able to map many functions onto different areas of
the brain, they have not found any Neural Self, nothing analogous to the cen-
tral processing unit in a computer, no center of operations from which the
workings of all other brain modules are controlled. This suggests a view of
mind as a distributed system in which processes occur in parallel but indepen-
dently of each other, without any overarching organization.
In addition to the subjective experience of having a self – of being a
person, not an aggregate of interacting but separate processes – two related
observations limit the accuracy of a purely distributed model of mind.
First, processing is selective. The processes that occur at any moment in
time constitute a small subset of the infinitely many processes that could