Ages ago, we're talking decades, back when Baxter was a bead in the wicked eye of a lonely aorta, we looked at how neuroscience interpreted aspects of the human way of being, a way of being that specializes in experiencing existence second by second. An existence in play that rebels against the disciplined understandings of working toward a sensible goal, as the painfully correct John Dewey and most all institutions of education would have us believe.
We swam around in the rather neat ways of thinking that suggest we people are constantly updating our view of the world, giving it a hard look and then comparing it with what our memory suggests is a view of the world as it was yesterday, or two seconds ago. Within this process we grasped that a mind has a capacity to predict what today - or now - should look like. This prediction emerges from a set of prior understandings, built slowly and often painfully over time and many hours spent in detention or on the dole line.
It's that isolated and distant castle that rules all and we had fun with Saint Teresa of Avila's insights into how we navigate our own Interior Castle if we'd ever been foolish enough to plan on a retirement in paradise.
Prediction, we tried to assure ourselves, is top down. There's a central control post, a big vein, perhaps a really bossy neuron, it could be a soul wanting to go home, it's a something, and do you know why science argues for a top down prediction of what today should look like. I'll tell you! Top Down is efficient, it saves energy, there's none of this committee libtarding around the Brie cheese and leaving the lights on because Chalky forgot his false teeth!
Then when the senses, those undeserving underlings start going all Bayes Theory - posh math talk for Bottom Up - the command post, that well dressed sunshine of our lives, can be persuaded to weigh its prior understandings against today's sensory inputs. Staying awake gets expensive while inputs moan and complain, and yes indeed the be and end of all things will need two ham sandwiches followed by a caramel flavored ice cream, dancing girls and a couple of chewable antacids. Either that or a sharpie with which to change the forecast.
There are occasions when Bottoms Up - or sensory inputs - achieve what you and I might prefer to call a Sodom Interpretation of what you and I rather pompously call the real world. And when a Sodom interpretation from the cellar presses too mightily on The Top, it can sometimes breach the barrier of priors and when it does, it can be honestly read as social collapse.
Here there's always a chance the messengers from the bottom will be locked in the strangling cupboard and forgotten, there's a call to the cavalry, and a committee of the ruling class makes laws that allows for the public execution of Luddites. And well worth remembering that far too often, priors with responsibility for the efficiency of accurately predicting today can become totally decoupled from reality. Loopholes help.
Lucky for us in the underclasses, at the moment we're still allowed to call this sort of irreversible retardation, Systemic Dissonance as we quietly drink ourselves into a stupor and wonder what happened to guilt in a new world of education that's divided work and plays.
To follow Kant and bring Hume back into the room we can be easily persuaded to believe that we people are inference machines, we never see "the thing in itself," and because we never see "the thing in itself," "the thing in itself" remains a creation of our mind.
I was almost four months old when the great educator John Dewey died. He cultivated one of those choir boy pervert middle partings for his hair. He developed his belief in Rational Empiricism while teaching at the University of Chicago which had been founded four years before he joined the faculty. And maybe it's just me but the Chicago School has, I'd argue, despite the passion of their claims to the contrary, always supported a Capitalist Elite and the widgetization - posh talk for objectification - of us people.
