If you had thought about how that might be modeled I doubt you’d have asked the question. A perception of memory is just another perception, with nothing to distinguish it except the source of its input. Suppose, arguendo, that consciousness is a perception of memory. What is ‘remembering’ if not a perception of memory? How do you model remembering differently from consciousness? How can you be conscious of the present moment of experience if it’s a perception of memory?
I’d like to point out some things in figure 3 from Power’s 1960 paper. I want to talk about the dotted lines. Starting from the bottom left, we see a dotted line which goes from the feedback function to the recording function. We also see a dotted line going from the recording function to the feedback function of order n+1. There is one more dotted line exiting the feedback function of the right-most system of order n. In the text, Powers says that one of these lines (specifically the imagination connection) is shown dotted at this point for a specific reason: “its introduction must be qualified because of the effects of having this connection present”. However, there are two other dotted lines. Are these lines dotted for the same reason? I suspect otherwise. I believe that a dotted line represents a different type of signal than a solid line. The reason I suspect this is because two otherwise identical signals, signals f^a and f^c (coming from the left and right-most systems of order n), are shown as one solid and one dotted. Given this discrepancy, I suspect that there is meaning behind whether or not a line is shown dotted or solid. But I do not believe this meaning is discussed in the text. I suspect that a solid line is an interpreted signal, as in one that has been transformed by a function such as y = x^2. Who is the author of this diagram and who can comment conclusively?
If you had thought about how that might be modeled I doubt you’d have asked the question. A perception of memory is just another perception, with nothing to distinguish it except the source of its input. Suppose, arguendo, that consciousness is a perception of memory. What is ‘remembering’ if not a perception of memory? How do you model remembering differently from consciousness? How can you be conscious of the present moment of experience if it’s a perception of memory?
The author of the figure is probably Bill, and in any case evidently credited (as part of the paper) to Bill and his co-authors.
This is Figure 3 of “A general feedback theory… Part I”, reprinted on p. 17 of Living Control Systems
. The accompanying text identifies the lower of the two dotted arrows as a copy of the perceptual input entering the memory function R to be stored there in an unspecified way, and it identifies the upper of the two as “a facsimile of the signal that was recorded” which enters the given control loop in lieu of present-time perceptual input when the R function “is selectively stimulated by a signal external to the local system.” So for the semantics of the graphical distinction of the dotted arrow (vs. the solid arrow) use words like “copy”. So much is evident in the text.
If you had thought about how that might be modeled I doubt you’d have asked the question. A perception of memory is just another perception, with nothing to distinguish it except the source of its input. Suppose, arguendo, that consciousness is a perception of memory. What is ‘remembering’ if not a perception of memory? How do you model remembering differently from consciousness? How can you be conscious of the present moment of experience if it’s a perception of memory?
