Note on Mental Operations

by C2-PO

*causal reasoning* is the only mental operation that has significant substance

the supposed module can be activated to calculate hedonically optimal life *goals*

for the process of *decision-making*, it can calculate prediction, foresight


*abstraction* of elements in the descriptions of a set of perspectives on a situation, can aid *problem solving*, it uses abstraction, loss of detail as a way to describe a variable, to be filled in when a solution is found in the world or mind

*common sense* is suggested to involve:
embodied cognition, simulating the perception of a situation from a perspective
emotions, decision-making involving more than one dimension (kind of emotion) resolves differently than one kind of emotion (eg expressing everything in pleasure)
abstraction, as suggested in problem-solving, creating a concrete representation with room for uncertainty or a solution


*reasoning* is reported to take the forms:

relational reasoning

analogical reasoning

logical reasoning

induction and deduction


relational and analogical reasoning involves relations between features

logical reasoning involves rules & categories

deduction involves rules & symbols

induction involves representation of a larger set by a smaller set

so, in a way, all reasoning can be described as a process involving rules and levels of abstraction (levels of loss of certain features, while keeping others), which is the hallmark of an 'invariant'

'invariant' can be used to replace talk of
features, categories and symbols


the term invariant most naturally indicates the need of the brain to recognize similar or identical percepts, while the actual sensory input for a similar or single thing always varies (noise, light, distance, orientation)

Finally, note that in the brain 'operations' and 'input' are hard to separate. In my blog entry 'the big peg' i argue that attention can serve to focus a network's operations or functions on the context of its input:

"Imagine a stack of copies of an image. Now imagine pulling copies in all directions, still overlapping. This is a distributed representation...

Now imagine it is a picture of a little light in the dark...

In the representation, the light is many little dots. This is what the effect of attention would be like.

The little dots, all over the place, would act as seeds (surrounded by the Big Peg of tags, associated predictions and actions) to focus the entire network on the object that has the focus of attention in a sensory area."

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