The Dynamics of Human Learning and Perception

We human beings as a living system represent a highly ordered, open, dynamic and far from equilibrium structures which soon after inception get accustomed to behave in a manner as is required to engage in the process of self organization.

Age old dictum of assuming Non-conscious behaviour as a functional capacity of subcortical structures only & cortex being the sole generator of conscious activity seems too obsolete and uninformative. We are horribly misled by this concept of ascribing such a towering position to conscious control in affairs pertaining to executive control of functions in an organism.

There is enough evidence and ongoing research to support the idea that perceptual inferences, learning, attention as well as subclasses of higher mental functions emerge from the tendency of the organism to deter itself from adopting the state / states accompanied by chances of increase in entropy.

Myelination of nerve fibers, (a process of wrapping up the branches of neuronal cell body to expedite conduction of nerve impulse) along with synaptic pruning establishes a state of neuronal maturation which by virtue of information processing, prepares the organism to exert a control over various components of voluntary and reflexive behaviour.

Convincingly it appears then that during our early years we are immersed in an expansive sea of information that may come from sources unimportant to us at future stages of cognitive exercises. A person living nearby a river may not need memory networks contrived to store information about seeking a source of water. Similarly, by the process of synaptic pruning, neural panorama of an individual quells the connections relaying unwanted information to brain, thereby reducing imposition of surprising or uncertain states upon the system (decreases entropy).

Selective silencing of certain neural networks in response to signals or information from the environment therefore enhances cognitive control of individuals in ways that specifically proclaim a good return of stable configuration for organisms. Besides this, the functional integration of various brain regions also serves the same purpose.

Harvesting information by means of perception minimizes free energy by causing the internal states of brain to change to predict sensory signals in a more effective way and at the same time the organism by acting on the environment modulates the sensory influx to better fit the preconceived model of sensory predictions. Action may thus bridge the gap between how our internal states want us to be and what our perception of external world feeds us.

Biological systems can accomplish the task of reducing free energy by employing means aimed at reducing prediction error in the overall behavior.

Taken together the free energy principle and motivation of neural network to augment the capacity of system to down scale prediction error, presents a schematic principle whereby prediction errors commensurate with the motor signals.

A phenomenon of emergence of motor control from predictive coding and the role of movement to quell proprioceptive prediction errors. Implications of such a formulation suggest that the information processing pertaining to proprioceptive impulses must be a prior to initiate a motor command.

Anatomical proximity of sensory cortex and primary motor cortex in the central sulcus or apposing ventral and dorsal horn representing motor and proprioceptive structural correlates of spinal cord do lend a supporting evidence to such a formulation based on predictive coding.

Certainly, we may infer that our motor and sensory system bear a structural and functional intimacy with each other in which inferences or learning experiences derived from them act as prior expectations ushering the motor behavior engendered in activity or action to strive to approximate as closely as possible with prior samples.

Simply stated, being more conscious means less access to the non-conscious and vice versa. This means conscious energy puts a limit on how much we can avail of esoteric nonconscious experiences and limits our ability to decode the information that is constitutively expressed by internal states of body, cells or genes, which other than being visible in a phenotypic form, do have potential access to original or primitive source of our non-physical self.

Fulfilling a desire to eat or have sexual intercourse remains unabated ever since human appearance on earth, but the methods to do so have been subject to suavity by requirements defined in a manner to avert any potential risk to organism.

To make fire in the present age, we do not need to use flint stones; but having heard this can be done with flint stones, we by virtue of information stored it in non-conscious mode, can accomplish this basic task if there are better ways to make fire go extinct.

Our initial encounters with nature may be considered to have resulted in two things. One is proclivity of organism to retain the imprint of courses undertaken to have primordial functions subserved at a level that might seem to constitute kernel of biological existence. Secondly in wake of evolutionary challenge to lessen the energy cost of primitive activism, a need for a keen mechanism with ability to generate and choose from multiple pathways designed to fulfil the expectations of primary biological urges of organism.

Source : Free Will by Rauf H Tak