499. Abstract of Posts 362-498

The past 136 posts to my blog, “Consciousness, the inside story,” make up the body of what I call:

SITUATED INTELLIGENCE

An Introspective, Experiential Approach

To Consciousness.

Abstract of posts 362-498.

Conscious human experience is an emergent property of the engagement between inner worlds of awareness (minds enabled by brains) and outer worlds of objects and ambient patterns of stimulation.

That engagement flows in a loop from intentional action through the several levels of nature, culture, community, and family, back to the initiating self by way of patterns of ambient energy rendered by the process of perception as sensory impressions.

Perception is enabled by memory of patterns formerly experienced, expectancy, arousal, interest and curiosity, attention, recognition, and a sense of novelty or familiarity, collectively forming a flow of sensory impressions.

Sensory impressions are understood (given meaning) by human intelligence situated within a particular configuration of what I call dimensions of experience, intelligence, or consciousness.

Those dimensions include memory, sensory patterns, biological values, life force (metabolic energy), emotions and motivations, feelings, discrepancies, comparisons leading to polarized preferences, beliefs, dreams, thoughts, ideas, imaginings, attitudes, aesthetic relationships, balance of concreteness and abstraction, and other such items (parameters) of inner awareness as constitute the situation determining the specific makeup of conscious intelligence at any given moment.

Situations are mental renditions or estimations that represent, but are not identical to, the current state of affairs in the outer world as witnessed from the perspective of a particular person’s situated intelligence. Situations are that person’s operative reality, and are always subject to refinement through further investigation.

Situated intelligence can feed directly into the action module of mind in such forms as reflexes, mimicry, routines, habits, prejudices, or orthodox beliefs, bypassing the scrutiny of full awareness as a basis for conscious judgment. These shortcuts promote stereotyped responses to given situations, saving mental energy perhaps, but not allowing for further consideration.

Judgment, on the other hand, relies on situated intelligence as a basis for further assessment and comparison of options for evaluating what is to be done in a given situation. In this case, options are acknowledged, interrelated, evaluated, and prioritized, making selection from among diverse choices possible as candidates for considered and appropriate action. Judgment is a time-consuming stage of consciousness, so entails a trade-off between facility and due consideration.

Judgment leads to the setting of goals, timelines, implementation of projects, development of skills, assembly of tools and materials, and finally implementation and fulfillment of a plan of action.

Action in the world launches the loop of engagement from mind into its surroundings in an effort to solve the world puzzle as proposed by the situation that perception presents to intelligence in terms of a constellation of mental parameters.

Perception, understanding, situation, intelligence, judgment, and considered action make up the mind’s portion of the loop of engagement. The out-of-body reaches of that loop include a variety of routes through nature, culture, community, and family, routes external to the mind’s jurisdiction, so constituting an independent component of consciousness that is not confined to the mind’s brain.

In effect, perception asks the question, “What’s happening now?” Situated intelligence asks, “What does that mean to me?” Judgment asks, “What are my options, and which one should I choose?” Action asks, “How should I turn that goal into behavior appropriate to my current situation?

It is up to the world (as composed of nature, culture, community, and family) to provide a link between action and the next round of perception-situation-intelligence-judgment-action, so providing the living context for the mind’s efforts to navigate by means of its wayfaring questions.

Engagement, then, is like a helix in which each round of engagement is slightly displaced from its predecessor, leading to a gap between the mind’s input and output, a discrepancy that elicits another round of consciousness as either having to deal with success or failure of what it is trying to do, leading to a sense of advancement or setback, victory or defeat, which serves to motivate the next round of engagement, leading to the one after that.

So does individual consciousness progress from one loop to the next, leading to the stream of consciousness composing one person’s lifetime of striving to bring inner reality into alignment with its external setting as evolution’s hands-off solution to individual survival under conditions it cannot gauge in advance.

Evolution, that is, provides no set or easy answers to the challenge it puts to all living beings. All we get, within limits, is one more chance, with perhaps another after that. Navigating between those chances is up to each of us individually. Consciousness is the tiller we are given for steering our way from inside-out.

Introspection is the best tool we have for mastering the use of that tiller.

The metaphor of the black-box problem is used throughout to illustrate the problem of solving the world puzzle from inside the black box of the mind, the converse problem being to solve the workings of the mind from a standpoint in the outside world.

Extensive examples are given of the author’s personal engagements with nature, culture, community, and family. Popular engagements are illustrated in the case of baseball, Roget’s Thesaurus, and humans’ historical fascination with the stars.

S.P., 03-30-2015, posted 05-04-2015

498. Outline of Posts 362-499

Outline of Posts 362-499