1. Gelernter's The Muse in the Machine
2. Evolution of Specialized Intelligences
3. Proto-Languages and Consciousness

Mind having dimensions moving through time. NOT Box with stored memories (records of time-events). NOT a container with physical dimensions, but it DOES have "compartments"—like fields with possible connections. (use of dimensions)

PLUS focus varying in both width and depth (in or connecting compartments). AND in intensity! (Also duration)

This focus is our awareness of what events occur in (or to?) this mind during motion through time. Whatever a theory of mind is, it must encompass or be reinterpretable, translatable, to all other working theories (or the working parts of other theories). Working in the sense of Dewey's Instrumentalism. (NEED to review)

1. We can learn to adjust this focus—in duration, width, and depth, AND intensity. (and in or connecting compartments?) [not quite sure what depth is unless it has to do with compartments] Is zero duration dreamless sleep? How does that differ from zero width, depth, or intensity?

2. This adjustment of focus is all we can do to modify our awareness.

3. There is no way we can ever be sure our focus has illuminated (or is illuminating) all of our mind—in all of its aspects.

Question: Just what are the dimensions of mind, besides time? Or do we need to enumerate the dimensions of time? (I.e., it is more than mere linear time.)

(The early problem of computers becoming a paradigm for mind because of their having circuits—but they also has fixed memory locations, etc.) [Does a computer have continuity when the power is turned back on?]

How does one describe a dynamic collection of resonances? E.g., circuits through time? Circuits have amplitude, frequency, duration, AND sequence! Back to Patterns: A Society of Patterns? E.g., patterns as waves? So what are properties of waves and the interaction of waves? And what is the interaction via focus???

!! Sequence implies code & information; therefore mind could be a Turing Machine described as a Function of Waves. [Is the focus like the read/write head of the machine?]

Chris Davia's Soliton waves?

Q: Gelernter says focus is NOT like flashlight (find reference). I recall De Bono said it was (might be).

Is high-focus simply the more intense and narrow end of the focus spectrum, and low-focus the more diffuse and broad? I.e., duration seems irrelevant in making the distinction. And depth seems too difficult to define. But G. seems to make no distinction between intensity and width of focus. I see these as separate dimensions.

Is emotion "in" the mind or is it just some form of concomitant physiological state?

In one sense, Gelernter's low-focus emotional thought is not thought at all! Just an awareness of the emotional state—a feeling. Either that or our consciousness is also just an awareness of our more-focused higher-ordered thought.

[Seems to be some serious confusion between Consciousness and Thought.]

Q: Is the reported emotion of a dream measurable—and is it comparable to same emotion in waking state?

F____'s emotion when "analyzing" poetry is high and mine isn't; but mine is high when "analyzing" social or computer problems.

So does the emotion follow the argument or lead it?

Q: High-focus re physical (e.g., sports) vs. low-focus re ZONE behavior. I.e., is high-focus in the ZONE really different from low-focus?

Futhermore . . .
Obviously, low-focus allows us to be aware of emotions, yes, but the real question is: How are emotions connected to thoughts? And more than thought, language. And, again obviously if we look even closer, to words! Further, is this a connection, an association, or what when words elicit (trigger!) emotions?
1. We know the emotion does not drive the word, because we have an emotional reaction when someone else uses the word (assuming we have no necessary awareness of his or her mental state).
2. Why then wouldn't we also react with emotion when—or possibly more accurately, after—we use the word?
3. And it seems to me the focus state is entirely irrelevant to having such reactions, although it might affect the speed of the reaction.
4. Therefore, why is focus state necessarily connected to emotion?

On page 78, he talks of memory with emotional content. But is it content or memory of an associated emotion? If the two are equivalent, then emotion is one of many types of things that can constitute the content of a memory, e.g., color. But this feels wrong to me. The memory of a color (or a sound) seems somehow different from an emotion (or a pain). Yet a singular color or sound memory is not separate from an event, nor is an emotion.

However, in Gelernter's approach you can overlay many specific memories of the color blue to generalize blue as an abstraction. Can you do the same for an emotion? Say love? Yes and no. What you get when you do this is not the generic emotion of love, but rather the idea of love—the abstraction. You say, for example, when experiencing a brand-new blue, that this looks like blue to me. But I doubt you would say the same of a new love, i.e., this feels like love to me. Or would you? Am I completely off base here? Wrong, in that all these—colors, sounds, emotions—are similar in being sensations of experience. (Qualia?)

In using Metaphor to examine Creativity, G. says creativity is the result of connection by emotional abstraction. (A different kind of abstraction: "The vocabulary of the abstraction is completely separate from the vocabulary of the thing being abstracted.") But I say it's any—and any number—of connections. He says metaphors are sudden, come from un-concentrating, just appear. I say poets know how to do this intentionally, i.e., by applying this low-focus tool in a high-focus fashion. He says the connection is the emotional abstraction; I say anything can be the connection, in fact, many metaphors have many connections. The more startling and more successful metaphors may indeed share only connection— heretofor unseen, which is what makes the metaphor great.

But poets intentionally create metaphors ALL the time. His example of the Land Rover and the hippopotamus is not a good example of his creativity hypothesis. These two have so much in common (headlights/two eyes, hood/head, four wheels/four legs, etc.), it would be a cinch to employ a computer to visually morph from one to the other. But hippo? Why not a rhino? They're even the same color.

Did you catch the metaphor in the last sentence? "Employ" a computer is such an obvious metaphor we pass right over it. Such weak metaphors are how we commonly use language. IOW, we're metaphoring all the time; language is mostly metaphor. It's the level, power, and uniqueness of a metaphor that makes it stand out—and so remind us of the power of creativity.

However, my key question is just why is a raven like a writing-desk? If this is to be a metaphor, we must discover the connection else it does not work. More unique metaphors are not obvious and require a mind-stretch to see the connection. It's when the leap is made that we are impressed by the power of the metaphor. But if we can't bridge the gap we fall, failing to grasp the connection. Simply put: all metaphors are not successful universally nor even of equal power. Aside from the alliteration, the raven does not appear to be like the writing-desk.

Is Gelernter saying that high-focus perceptions become one kind of memory and low-focus another? And further, that the former (high-focus memories) are better accessed in a high-focus state and the latter in a low-focus one? Dreams, for example, being an instance of the latter. Yet, as Freud found out and many analysts have profited from, it is possible to move the recall of dreams into the high-focus and expensive state of analysis. Conversely, low-focus creativity can arise from discerning patterns in associated high-focus memories.

!Low-focus is to be without censorship, again as in dreams.

Despite his unique approach, Gelernter's theory still fails because it falls into the category of Single-Mind theories. I.e., the mind is all-of-one piece, homogenous, in all its parts. As opposed to a society, or a hierarchy, or areas of specialization.