Part of a series exploring how economic thought leads to cognition and cognitive behaviour
If our brains are tangled like kabelsalat is there a way in which we could work backwards to find out how we got to here?
To function all organisms respond in some way to the environment.
Information in some form is transduced so that it is integrated and interpreted. This does not require consciousness from the organism.
Within the organism this transduced information requires a potential difference of some form for it to be able to respond to the environment.
In some way this transduced information must map or represent the constituents of the environment whose affects it is rendering.
How then can we universally represent this information?
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One of the main grips about high school maths is its lack of applicability to the “real world”, especially trigonometry. I’ve never summoned the courage to explain that practically all of our real world is based on sins and cosines with the help of some imaginary numbers.
Sinusoids are great if you want to transmit information.
They have a period or wavelength and a frequency.
At first this might seem trivial but it allows to you say different things.
We can say what a wavelength is. This allows us to be accurate. Electromagnetic wavelength of 480 nanometres will be the same hue as another source of the same wavelength.
We can also say how a frequency is. This allows us to be precise. We can say how many times something will occur with respect to something else.
In common usage we often interchange precision and accuracy but we need them to refer to different things.
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For our brain to furnish us with a useful representation of the environment we need both to be gleaned from the information we receive from it.
Luckily for us our brain does this for us.
The electrical signals that zip and ping through out brains are streamed as packets of information caused by the refractory period of the potential difference than impels them.
How and what the environment is is integrated and available for us to interpret.
Encountering the same transform of information from the environment gives rise to the same sensation.
The ability to recount a transform gives rise to experience.
It is from this experience that we learn what responses provide us with a benefit over the environment and how we can gain, as our ancestors did, from it.
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