Bohm’s Rheomode and Understanding Intelligence
Intuition is that process when we remember our present to coordinate with our future.
Gibson came up with the word affordance. It’s derived from the verb ‘afford’. I’ve always liked the term since it implies the recognition of possibilities. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
There’s a problem though with his method. He took a verb and created a noun. He should have listened to David Bohm who realized that our noun-centric language could be restricting our ability to understand the world. He called his verb-centric language rheomode.
It has been proposed that the brain deals with 4 kinds of semantics. Referential semantics, combinatorial semantics, emotional-affective semantics, and abstraction mechanisms. cell.com/trends/cogniti…
Bohm’s Rheomode levate, vidate, dividate, reordinate which are abstract cognitive processes overlap but don’t align with these semantics. Combinatorial and emotional-affective fits under levate. Referential and abstraction fits under reordinate.
There’s a rough correspondence between Bohm’s Rheomode and Peirce’s triadic thinking:
I suspect that because Peirce's ideas were 100 years old and have been adopted by many over the years, the idea has been crystallized into a form that has lost some generality.
Bohm’s Rheomode is a generalization of thinking processes but without the historical baggage that has attached to the words that Peirce had originally coined.
A difficulty in developing a language to express cognition is that it’s unavoidable to use words that have historical meanings. The advantage of Rheomode is that like Gibson’s affordance, these words are entirely new and thus less prone to misinterpretation.
Paul Cisek decided he had enough with the conventional taxonomy of cognition (i.e. input, output, cognition) and decided on a new taxonomy.
The first thing to notice about this is that all behavior is rooted in homeostasis. Damasio argues that the purpose of the brain is homeostasis.
The second thing to notice is under interaction (i.e. doing) there is selection and specification. Recall that in my post about the meaning of computation, that computation is the interplay between intention and mechanism.
So what happens in the cerebral cortex is… well computation. But I want to create even finer distinctions with intention/action selection and mechanism/action specification. This is where I take inspiration from David Bohm.
First, let’s refacor Cisek’s original taxonomy to use words that are verbs. Below is such a change, with additional capabilities that extend Cisek’s original evolutionary diagram.
Then let’s create even more fine-grain distinctions using Rheomode verbs. These are to levate, to vidate, to dividate and to ordinate. These are related to attention, perception, decomposition and order (includes abstraction). The importance of using verbs cannot be emphasized enough. The way brains understand the world is in the way they interact with the world. It is informative to contrast this with Peirce triad of inference types: induce, deduce and abduce (conventionally the noun form is used: induction, deduction and abduction).
Now let’s throw in a mix of C.S. Peirce semiotics and we have a new refreshed and advanced vocabulary for cognition!
Gone is the impoverished notion of thinking of the brain as like a computer! I’m fed up with conversations going in circles because we have a pis-poor vocabulary!
We now have a vocabulary that expresses everything that needs to expressed about cognition. This is a first step in a theory of general intelligence.
Let’s revisit 4EA — Embedded, Embodied, Extended, Enacted, and Affective to see if we’ve covered all bases in our vocabulary. Cisek’s evolutionary perspective captures embedded, embodied, and enactive. Extended seems to be an advanced cognitive capability that we need to express.
Extended can be expressed as a generalization of shared intentionality. Shared intentionality (Tomasello) is coordinated behavior with agents. Coordinated behavior with tools is usually what extended implies. Shared information is expressed under the Peirce genuine signs.
Social cognition, imitation, mind-reading, and language are advanced cognitive capabilities. These are distinctions of shared intentionality. Sensorimotor empathy is the shared movement. Computational empathy is shared intention and specification.
Symbol grounding (I prefer detachment) is a downstream capability from computational empathy. This follows the evolutionary path as a consequence of shared behavior: participation->perception->procedure->proposition.
Let’s expand this using Gibson’s method of defining a relationship between the duality of agents and the environment. In this case, the environment includes other agents that participate with the same intentions.
BTW, I did fail to mention that in Cisek’s taxonomy, perception is absent! This is because action and perception are the same things. You can see underneath action selection is the act of object detection.
In contrast, Bohm’s Rheomode, which is verbs (i.e. processes and not things), doesn’t have action, only perception! Cognitive evolution is that we begin with action and we evolve into perception. This further evolves into procedural and propositional thinking.
What I’m showing is how the evolution progresses towards higher-order thinking from a kind where action and perception are inseparable. Although we may think that higher-order thinking is separate from action, this is not the case for humans.
The human cognitive cognition as a consequence of our evolution implies the permanent coupling of action and perception. We learn by performing an action and not by perception alone! We learn through interaction, this implies the intermingling of intending and specifying. That is, we learn by knowing how to generate our intentions.
Human intelligence is a consequence of prior cognitive habits that were developed long before homo-sapiens set foot on this earth. That is why it is senseless for many researchers to ignore evolution.
