"Comparing contexts" as the basis of spiritual evolution.

Here is a long quote from a still longer web page on a type of randomness called Markov Processes. It delicate assembles the key ideas on the emergent foundations of memory.

The really significant sentence in the long quote for me is almost majestic in wisdom: It is this:

"The moment you start to use memory what you are doing is comparing contexts, 'this' with 'that' and the more you do this the more you approach a level where 'emergence' can happen and so the development of a memory system followed by the emergence of concepts of 'self', 'others' and consciousness in general, and all from 'basic' feedback processes."

What a magical sentence! Comparing Contexts!

Here, then, is the slightly larger context of the idea:


"The Emergence of Meaning from Feedback Processes

Reflecting on the requirement that Markov chains have no memory, it become apparent that any form of consciousness would be at best 'fleeting'; perhaps a sort of 'awareness' that cannot go past the moment. If you try to put this in the form of a context series using discrete time concepts so a Markov chain is expressable as a sequence of 1s:

1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1

where each moment, regardless of scale, is always 'new', always 'now'. (Interestingly, many religions try to achieve this state -- Taoism, Zen etc)

If you now add the ability to distinguish one moment from the previous we see the emergence of a primitive mind-set in the form of remembering sequence. Thus our 1,1,1,1,1 becomes:

1,2,3,4,5,6

Where each moment is added to the previous. We see a form of this in territorial mappings where the sequence method is used in the form of waypoint mapping to mark-out territory (A to B to C ...) and this sequence, when brought around back to the beginning creates a sense of 'ownership', of 'mineness'.

Now let us consider what happens when we consider the previous TWO contexts, whenever we do this, where we add the previous two contexts together to give us the current, we find ourselves dealing with one of the most basic manifestions of feedback processes used for development. This is in the form of a Fibonacci sequence:

1,2,3,5,8,13,....

This pattern is extremely common in life and seems to manifest the basic minimum required for development with a minimum use of energy.

As we increase the number of contexts to add together to give us 'meaning' we find that when we go back to the beginning of anything, to the FIRST instance and then sum ALL contexts from that point, we end up with an emerging binary sequence:


1,2,4,8,16,32,.....

At this point something 'interesting' happens in that to go beyond this level we enter the realm of complexity/chaos and the concept of emergence. But how? The answer is to add more feedback than is already there. A classic example of this is in the human mind where, seeing someone walking down a street our memories map that person to someone we know and immediately a flood of feelings can emerge that will influence us if we meet that person, we put more into the meeting than is actually there and so lead to an 'emergence' that is a direct result of the addition of feedback beyond just 'the moment'.

Verhulst showed that going beyond 2 leads into these unstable areas (using a number line. Mandelbrot does the same thing using the imaginary number plane giving us the Mandelbrot Set).

What we are seeing in these sequences are the basic building blocks of developing a memory and so the patterns that come with these processes. In a pure object oriented frame of reference, the one favoured by mathematicians, there is NO link AT ALL from one moment to the next other than in time. Thus there is no way that last week's lotto draw can affect this week's draw. Every draw is a unique moment, a '1' as we find in Markov Chains; there is no memory. The moment you start to use memory what you are doing is comparing contexts, 'this' with 'that' and the more you do this the more you approach a level where 'emergence' can happen and so the development of a memory system followed by the emergence of concepts of 'self', 'others' and consciousnessin general, and all from 'basic' feedback processes."

End of quote.