Cognition and Reality

TL;DR

This paper explores the dual aspects of human cognition—apprehension and judgment—highlighting their temporal dynamics, underlying Bayesian inference processes, and their roles in understanding reality through hermeneutic methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interpretation of cognition as involving inverse Bayesian inference for judgment, and distinguishes two hermeneutic processes that uncover features of reality.

Findings

Apprehension modeled as Bayesian inference.

Judgment involves inverse Bayesian inference.

Two hermeneutic processes: circle and coil.

Abstract

We discuss the two moments of human cognition, namely, apprehension (A), whereby a coherent perception emerges from the recruitment of neuronal groups, and judgment(B),that entails the comparison of two apprehensions acquired at different times, coded in a suitable language and retrieved by memory. (B) entails self-consciousness, in so far as the agent who expresses the judgment must be aware that the two apprehensions are submitted to his/her own scrutiny and that it is his/her task to extract a mutual relation. Since (B) lasts around 3 seconds, the semantic value of the pieces under comparison must be decided within that time. This implies a fast search of the memory contents. As a fact, exploring human subjects with sequences of simple words, we find evidence of a limited time window , corresponding to the memory retrieval of a linguistic item in order to match it with the next one in a text flow (be it literary, or musical,or figurative). While apprehension is globally explained as a Bayes inference, judgment tresults from an inverse Bayes inference. As a consequence, two hermeneutics emerge (called respectively circle and coil). The first one acts in a pre-assigned space of features. The second one provides the discovery of novel features, thus unveiling previously unknown aspects and hence representing the road to reality.