46 3 A Patternist Philosophy of Mind
q___ initial focus a (concepts, procedures, = I inference rules, etc.) aay , |] (os -_ = 7 fc | set of items set of items that
that combine to yield
items in initial focus nie epee
Fig. 3.2: The General Process of Analysis
Conceptually one may view synthesis as a very generic sort of “growth process,” and analysis as a very generic sort of “figuring out how to grow something.” The intuitive idea underlying the present proposal is that these forward-going and backward-going “growth processes” are among the essential foundations of cognitive control, and that a conceptually sound design for cognitive control should explicitly make use of this fact. To abstract away from the details, what these processes are about is:
e taking the general dynamic of compound-formation and reduction as outlined in Kampis and Chaotic Logic
e introducing goal-directed pruning (“filtering”) into this dynamic so as to account for the limitations of computational resources that are a necessary part of pragmatic intelligence
3.4.3 The Dynamic of Iterative Analysis and Synthesis
While synthesis and analysis are both very useful on their own, they achieve their greatest power when harnessed together. It is my hypothesis that the dynamic pattern of alternating synthesis and analysis has a fundamental role in cognition. Put simply, synthesis creates new mental forms by combining existing ones. Then, analysis seeks simple explanations for the forms in the mind, including the newly created ones; and, this explanation itself then comprises additional new forms in the mind, to be used as fodder for the next round of synthesis. Or, to put it yet more simply:
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