Reply To: Questions about Model 2, Brains and Consciousness

[Juan E. Sandoval]

Heya! (I moved this to its own thread, cuz it's a big enough topic to deserve a dedicated discussion, I hope that's okay.)
Good questions. Lets see if I can answer a few or all.

Correct me if I am wrong but this looks to me as a try to explain act of perception itself (in this case visual perception) and we or our cognitive apparatus are take as robots with cameras that register incoming data and changing it into some internal representations.

So, regarding this one, CT is not concerned directly with the optic feed. Here is how CT is oriented in relation to the optic feed:

^ If you look to the top right corner, you'll see that there's a sequence here which goes External Reality --> Visual Processing --> P+ Information Gathering.
This intermediary step (visual processing) happens before we even get to P+'s operations, and this is where the brain applies very old programs such as the shadow corrections we see which are responsible for optical illusions.

Getting to P+

To oversimplify it, the way I understand it is that the optic nerve, in itself, is similar to an RGB cable that has one "pixel" per cone. The nerve reaches the hypothalamus before anything else, where the raw image data undergoes its first round of processing, and scans for archaic dangers, like snakes, or positives like faces, using very simplistic and rapid analysis. Effectively, this can cause a hypothalamus response (an emotional response) to something which we haven't even "seen" in our mind's-eye yet.
Next it then also routes to the visual cortex, where it undergoes processing which creates the "mind's eye", with the help of some optical "software" that we might as well equate with "firmware." These are things we have no conscious control over, for example, how our eyes adjust to lighting by compensating for shadows, focus/distance, or the 'tricks' we have which can also be shown to create those optical illusions mentioned above. I suspect things like object edge detection are part of this too.
What this does is that the net visual processing involved in all of these areas prepare the data so that by the time we 'consciously' perceive it, it has already been parsed into the lowest form of objects (representations, yes). And this is what arrives at P+ and into short term memory.

Here, the CTA focuses on object management at the next level of abstraction, using these pseudo-objects as the raw martial from which to superimpose abstract objects onto the visual data -- and then it mainly handles that "next-level" data, being now quite removed from the optic feed itself.
So the guy in the video is right -- at this level, our mental processing can have reciprocal influence on the perception of the information. If we use memory recall like with that Brexit audio phrase, and we re-play the audio sound, the sensory information that reaches our Object Management gets reinterpreted, so that the net result is a mixture of the combined inputs from outside, and what we're adding to that input from inside. In the Brexit audio example, this would be P- echoing out a precedent, and altering the definition of theObject, so that it now 'becomes' the net combination of the sensory inputs + what was echoed out by our brains into it. When the pseudocode uses phrases like theObject = intersectingObject at the end of a processing loop, this is effectively the inside-out overriding/re-defining of sensory data with our interpretations, to where it is henceforth perceived as the interpretation.
I hope that explains at least one of your questions!
I know there's others, and I might get to them in a bit. But I'll post this for now.