Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

THOUGHT: CONSTANT CONTINGENT RELATIONS “ALL THE WAY DOWN” All human thought consists of the physical production of constant yet contingent relations. That is all neurons can store: constant yet contingent relations. Relations between stimuli. Those relations begin with stimuli and through sequential layers, accumulate in increasingly combinatory relations, and through iterations, in real time, create a ‘persistence of vision’ (a model or models) that we experience as the culmination of continuous stimulation of our senses, and the admixture of those senses with upward associations, and downward models. When we say consciousness, we refer to the difference between our ability to judge changes in state (a few times a second) with the iterations of stimuli, memory, and synthesis into models. Neurons can fire two hundred times a second. It takes about one hundred ms to cause your body to physically act (depending upon the distance). It takes about about a half a second to react to a scare. It takes approximately one to three seconds of continuous stimulation to construct a new model (during surprise, or walking into a new room). And the persistence of vision effect (on memory) has a half life of something on the order of half a second. Although variation in short term memory is one of the abilities that vastly differentiates us. When someone uses the term logical they mean (whether they understand it or not, that the network of constant relations between the universe, the stimuli, their neural memory (relations), memory (categories) and models (networks of categories), remains consistent (internally), correspondent (externally), and coherent (free of conflict or contradiction).