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-occurence 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 bootstraping 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 occuring 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 signalling 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/supporess emotions/feelings?
- Why do we need to be conscious to have feelings or express emotions?
- What's the difference between sensing pain and knowning 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)?