50 3 A Patternist Philosophy of Mind
must be counteracted by a pragmatic tendency to remove items from the attentional focus if giving them attention is not providing sufficient utility in terms of the achievement of system goals.
The synthesis and analysis perspective provides a more systematic perspective on this self- reinforcing dynamic. Synthesis occurs in the attentional focus when two or more items in the focus are combined to form new items, new relationships, new ideas. This happens continually, as one of the main purposes of the attentional focus is combinational. On the other hand, Analysis then occurs when a combination that has been speculatively formed is then linked in with the remainder of the mind (the “unconscious”, the vast body of knowledge that is not in the attentional focus at the given moment in time). Analysis basically checks to see what support the new combination has within the existing knowledge store of the system. Thus, forward-analysis basically comes down to “generate and test”, where the testing takes the form of attempting to integrate the generated structures with the ideas in the unconscious long- term memory. One of the most obvious examples of this kind of dynamic is creative thinking (Boden, 2003; Goertzel, 1997), where the attentional focus continually combinationally creates new ideas, which are then tested via checking which ones can be validated in terms of (built up from) existing knowledge.
The analysis stage may result in items being pushed out of the attentional focus, to be replaced by others. Likewise may the synthesis stage: the combinations may overshadow and then replace the things combined. However, in human minds and functional AI minds, the attentional focus will not be a complete chaos with constant turnover: Sometimes the same set of ideas — or a shifting set of ideas within the same overall family of ideas — will remain in focus for a while. When this occurs it is because this set or family of ideas forms an approximate attractor for the dynamics of the attentional focus, in particular for the forward-analysis dynamic of speculative combination and integrative explanation. Often, for instance, a small “core set” of ideas will remain in the attentional focus for a while, but will not exhaust the attentional focus: the rest of the attentional focus will then, at any point in time, be occupied with other ideas related to the ones in the core set. Often this may mean that, for a while, the whole of the attentional focus will move around quasi-randomly through a “strange attractor” consisting of the set of ideas related to those in the core set.
3.4.5 Conclusion
The ideas presented above (the notions of synthesis and analysis, and the hypothesis of self and attentional focus as attractors of the iterative forward-analysis dynamic) are quite generic and are hypothetically proposed to be applicable to any cognitive system, natural or artificial. Later chapters will discuss the manifestation of the above ideas in the context of CogPrime. We have found that the analysis/synthesis approach is a valuable tool for conceptualizing CogPrime’s cognitive dynamics, and we conjecture that a similar utility may be found more generally.
Next, so as not to end the section on too blasé of a note, we will also make a stronger hypothesis: that, in order for a physical or software system to achieve intelligence that is roughly human-level in both capability and generality, using computational resources on the same order of magnitude as the human brain, this system must
e manifest the dynamic of iterated synthesis and analysis, as modes of an underlying “self- generating system” dynamic
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