Cognitive and Grounded Understanding
Language is the representational abstraction of the natural world. It is the platform we superimpose on nature to make it intelligible. It is this cognitive layer that turns things from natural to human. Once things are defined they can be understood, controlled and owned. This is the human world we play and work in.
The world of language manifests in the mind as thoughts. It is the platform that makes ideas roughly equal to thoughts. All ideas are thoughts but not all thoughts contain ideas. []
This makes ideas quick to generate and change. It makes it easy to keep them in working memory and monitor their state. In fact I think the world of language is used to translate the connections of the subconscious to the conscious mind. Which makes me suspect that the cognitive layer is the set of things you are seeing actively.
But that doesn’t mean you’re seeing them deeply. In fact the cognitive model is the most economically convenient. Because attention is expensive. Not only that, active awareness has bandwidth limits.
If one does not let go of what is being kept in working memory, which may happen if thinking is your primary mode of being alive, it is easy to overload the system. In fact it is exactly because of the system’s limits that thoughts move quickly. Because it has to allow a large quantity of information to flow through. That’s only possible if each thought leaves a superficial impression.
We can see why it is so limited only by walking at the edge of the cognitive model’s capabilities. Thoughts we are actively aware of are explicit information. Going at the edge means articulating all the implicit connected thoughts.[] That’s how the cognitive model becomes your world model, how you perceive things. This makes thoughts low dimentional perception representations.
That makes perception mediated from the top-down. Perception becomes an engineered translation. When you reach that you lose the ability to perceive and experience directly.
After a while I realize I’m only experiencing compressions and projections. Reality collapsed in the world of language. As experience is blunted and thought articulation reaches saturation there is a shortage of novelty. Because learning from experience is so much more concrete, when one only learns in thought things become static. As I forgot how experience feels, information starts to recycle.
The cognitive model only allows what is low dimentional, explicit and precise. So it cuts higher dimentional states that would allow things to be ambiguous and ineffable. Which means it inhibits emotions.
When I realized the ineffable is what is outside the world of language. I understood my experiential debt was very high. And my cognitive model had no sustainable way to pay it back.
First I had to get out of there. The problem is that you can’t think yourself out of thinking. So the inverse would be to see if I’m in there.
For me the test to see if I’m in cognitive reality are art and pleasure. If I can’t feel them that means I have become desentizised. I’m only seeing the cognitive representation and no emotion.
The only way to build a new world model is to open up to experience something new. I found this new model of reality one piece at a time. This is the grounded model.
I suspected beforehand that there was another model of perception because my experiential debt caused me to understand things intellectually, but not really grasping them. More precisely even though I could understand and describe something logically, I would still not grasp or believe it.
I noticed a similar patterns in my beliefs and wants. I can’t not care about something that I care about. I can cognitively control what i want to want. but i can’t easily change desires based in emotion.
I noticed that emotions influence thoughts more than thoughts influence emotions. they have stronger signal.
by stronger i mean clear and direct. direct native perception, no translation layers, no collapse. This allowed much more implicit information, this makes it not only multimodal, but also higher dimentional. dense and intense, slower, but long lasting. at times ineffable
what i understood is that the cognitive model is linear, but it feels synthetic and constructed. the grounded, emotional, felt model is non-linear. It is less predictable, not directly and quickly controllable, but it feels real, authentic and alive. in fact i noticed it is feeling things that makes them feel real and concrete.
it turns off the artificial interpretive layer and allows for raw, unmediated sensory data. bottom up perception, direct native interpretation.
I noticed this because I was often a top down learner, I wanted to see the whole tree at once and be able to recall it all and any piece out of context. so when i learned i wanted to be aware of everything immediately. But the limited bandwidth of the cognitive model prevented this. In fact ever since I adopted that model I had memory retention problems. Cognitive memories are mostly lost.
but i noticed that when i would learn something in my hobbies like nutrition, health, writing, etc... I was not cognitively aware during the learning, so it felt like i was not learning in the moment because I could not recall the whole tree at once, but later i could recall it all in detail when the right contextual stimulus prompted it.
learning trails top down, bottom up, curiosity trail, figure it out iterative trail, based on need / objective trail.
I eventually connected the dots and realized that when I was absorbing information in a grounded way I was internalizing knowledge and information. seeing evidence at the source allowed it to got metabolized, ombodied. the richness of experience was unpararelled. I was perceiving widely rather than giving attention narrowly. Everything got encoded in a high dimentional model from which all that was experienced can be extracted. and retained. The place that model lives is the subconscious.
The subconscious has way higher bandwidth than the conscious mind. the hardest part of becoming, imitation, adoption this model was trusting that i was learning when i was not monitoring and paraphrasing and reharsing the whole thing. Experiential learning unlocked.
the block is that i imposed reason always rather than intuition intuitive understanding doesnt make you see the whole tree, rather you go through it
majority of knowledge is subconscious, unconscious until you have to explain, experts have a higher proportion of unconscious knowledge than beginners, manifests as somatically felt understanding
I was surprised at seeing how effortless the grounded model is to maintian. i was used to the laborious maintanance of the cognitive model. not everything needs to be made explicit. but trusting the felt model allows massive offloading of working memory. because it becomes a generative process rather than mnemonic.
so now this is my cognitive fitness set of heuristics.
Cognitive layer is important and allows abstraction, what is bad is living in it. It is the space where rational decisions are taken, negotiations. commitments it is a collection of thoughts and narratives. but its limits lead to accumulation and overload and no generation, limiting novelty.
Grounded layer has to be trained, you can’t create it out of a decision. behavioral trained overtime. this is where execution lies. you can’t think yourself into change. for it to develop you must output and generate a lot, which prevents cognitive overload. you need to work hard and trust the subconscious is doing its job.