Association and Logic

Some thoughts: Visual and auditory systems came first in humans, much before language. The ability to gather information about the environment and to react to or act on it was something humans could do long before they could speak, just as animals do now. I started thinking about a multi-stage process with respect to the evolution of cognition and how information might be organized and accessed in the human mind.

If we imagine there are pools of information mapped in the mind of a human, gleaned from perceptual experience (perhaps based on Gestalt Principles of Perception) -- a collection of images and sounds, and then we introduce verbal language with syntactic structure, we can begin to imagine how structure and rules might be applied to enforce a layer of organization on top of (or virtually onto) all the pools or clusters of information recorded in the mind of a human.

The raw data 'objects' are the visual images and verbal components that are organized locally or by association, based on similarity, proximity, good continuity, etc. It's like a big clustered database, a cloud.

Manipulation of these information objects can be achieved in a more sophisticated fashion by applying syntactic rules. Language is linear and directional. I --> go --> there. I --> give --> you --> food. It identifies a subject (me), an action, and a place (in the first example). It identifies a subject (me), an action, another subject (you) and another object (food), in the second example.

I think human logic may have arrived with the dawn of verbal language ability. The principles of linguistics may act to order and structure associated information, if desired, into a logical form. By 'logic', I mean causal, or propositional. If -- > then. With logic, there is also a concept of cause and effect, and time.

In summary, this would mean that information in the mind is initially grouped based on Gestalt Principles. It is associatively mapped and looks like a big cloud, or a collection of information molecules (where the nucleus is the concept and the atoms are attributes). The database of information is grouped based on shared attributes (colour, shape, size, behaviour, proximity in time). Then logical rules are applied across the associated categories, which can manipulate and change the shape of the information, to organize it in different ways.

But where do the patterns come in to play? This is the question. Are the pattern frameworks below the level of the logical rules? Do we average information into pattern structures?