March 10, 2020
Listening to Karl Friston on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast this morning, something came to mind regarding the Planning Cat and the In The Moment Cat.
It seems a fundamental challenge to animal life, as itinerant systems, is motion detection. Motion can be danger and death; motion can be food and opportunity. (Same goes for sound. We need to organize the background music so that the snapping of a twig, which might mean our end, stands out. But here I’m dwelling on light and vision.)
I was sitting by a very early and successful higher organism, a dragonfly, one day. Its compound eye seems to provide one way to detect motion – by comparing change across the different views. But my type of vision is different. I focus on something, moving my head and eyes about. I need to hold peripheral vision more or less constant to minimize consumption of brain energy. So my brain makes up a story about what is going on at the edges, checking the story only periodically.
The brain is practised at making up stories when it comes to vision because, it seems, there is a huge, roughly 200ms, latency between eye and brain. This needs to be compensated for, or we would be sitting ducks for all kinds of calamity. So what we “see” is already a prediction anyway. And a prediction is a story. Is this the source of consciousness? Both cats are conscious. So is the dragonfly. But the Planning Cat strings together a story, over time, with herself as the central character – just as we do. The long-story version of ourself, which we carry around, emerges over time from the more in the moment child.
MOE
M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity