In my previous post I likened a 'true' thought to an active 3D protein; in the same way that proteins react with each other to form more complex proteins, thoughts react with each other to produce more complex thoughts.
What about senses? When our visual cortex receives signals from our eyes, how are these represented and processed?
I believe that senses are processed in the same way as our thoughts. In fact, I consider them to be the same thing. I visualize the eyes as pouring in a stream of tiny active structures into our mind that immediately start reacting to form more complex active structures that represent higher level features of the visual scene. Ditto for the other sensory organs.
As an aside, I think that the 'reaction' process for active structures is additive. For example, if two structures representing lines as different angles are recognized and bound by a third structure that represents a right angle, then all three structures are now clumped together as part of the reaction; the structure representing the right angle does not destroy the structures that represented the two lines. The concept of additive reactions will become very important later on in this series.
To summarize; I believe that pretty much all 'information' in a brain is represented as active structures that are continually reacting with each other. Some reactions give rise to increasingly complex assemblies of active structures, whereas others fizzle out into nothingness. Sensory input is immediately converted into thousands of active structures that represent the smallest features in the sensory domain, and these immediately start reacting to form larger active structures that represent higher-level features in the domain.
So what I described in my last post as a 'true' thought is simply a non-trivial emergent active structure.
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