Preliminary Thoughts on Cognition

In my previous post, I talked about an economy as a self-organizing computational system that consists of economic agents. But automated systems aside, economics agents are largely human. Thus one can't understand an economy without understanding the idiosyncratic nature of human cognition - here's my take. Note that I'm not that well-read in cognitive sciences or psychology and my use of terminologies may be contrary to how they are used by experts in various fields.

A human mind, much like an economy, itself is a distributed computational system. The manner in which this distributed computation works requires close examination. First, different areas of the brain are responsible for different functions. Neurofunctional analysis reveals that some areas have specific functionalities across all humans, while other kinds of specialization based on brain locality show variation with some statistical patterns. Neverthelesss, the picture we have is that of a self-organizing, physical, computational network.

But that's not the whole picture. In fact, it's not even the most useful one. Imagine using a modern computer to build a multimedia web site. You'd be using various software packages to record sounds, videos and take photos, perhaps edit them using other software packages and test them out using yet another software package and upload them to some remote server. While it's clear that a lot of different hardware components were working together to help you achieve this goal, the interaction at the hardware level, by itself, would be entirely incomprehensible, and without understanding the interaction at the software level - betweenvarious software packages and the operating system (which themselves are composed of interacting processes) coordinated by the user and the system to achieve the desired outcome. It's not that your mouse, keyboard, CPU, RAM, hard disk, monitor, video card, motherboard, USB ports, etc, didn't work together - but that the specific activity cannot be meaningfully comprehended (or even distinguished from any other activity) by examining interaction at that level.

Likewise, while simple forms of cognition can be understood as interaction among different areas of the brain, more complex cognitive tasks not only engage different areas of the brain, but also different global processes, each of which is utilizing multiple areas of the brain. This is the second picture we have of the mind - the mind as a self-organizing computational network of mental processes. This is a virtual network built on top of the physical network. Keep in mind that as with computers, exactly what constitutes a single "process" depends on the point of view - often what is recognizable as a single process can also be seen as a group of processes and so on. This sort of issue exists with genes, species, culture, race, etc, but the inability to precisely delineate does not stop us from using the concepts usefully in communicating knowledge. To conclude, if the key to understanding economics is understanding the nature of interaction between economic agents as well as the nature of economic agents, the key to understanding the human mind is understanding the nature of interaction between mental processes as well as the nature of mental processes.