I’m coming to the conclusion that rather than the program level being an upper level within the perceptual hierarchy, it’s a separate hierarchical system that organises information in a non-subjective manner; it’s the system of language, knowledge, facts and semantics that we form about the world that other theories are so obsessed with (beliefs). They do exist! But they are a privileged addition from the human evolutionary heritage rather than a fundamental of our nervous system architecture - that’s still the perceptual hierarchy, and the perceptual hierarchy is still necessary for generating new perceptions. But Phil B explains the advantage of ‘decoupling’ this propositional knowledge from the (motivated; egocentric) perceptual hierarchy. It gives us logic, language, spatial reasoning, etc.
See what you think…