What Is Memory that It May Have Hindsight and Foresight as well? - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 104

Example: After arrival from a flight I am asked about the food served by
this airline. My answer:
“FILET MIGNON
WITH FRENCH FRIES AND SOME SALAD,
AND AN UNDEFINABLE DESSERT.”
My behavior in response to this question—I believe—appears reasonable
and proper. Please note that nobody expects me to produce in response to
this question a real
filet mignon
with french fries and some salad
and an undefinable dessert.
I hope that after my previous discussion of storage and retrieval systems it
is clear that my verbal response cannot be accounted for by any such
system. For in order that the suspicion may arise that I am nothing but a
storage and retrieval system first the sentence :
“FILET MIGNON
WITH FRENCH FRIES AND SOME SALAD,
AND AN UNDEFINABLE DESSERT.”
had to be “read in” into my system where it is stored until a querier pushes
the appropriate retrieval button (the query) whereupon I reproduce with
admirable invariance of quality (high fidelity) the sentence:
“FILET MIGNON
WITH FRENCH FRIES AND SOME SALAD,
AND AN UNDEFINABLE DESSERT.”
However, I must ask the generous reader to take my word for it that nobody
ever told me what the courses of my menu were, I just ate them.
Clearly something fundamentally different from storage and retrieval is
going on in this example in which my verbal behavior is the result of a set
of complex processes or operations which transform my experiences into
utterances, i.e., symbolic representations of these experiences.
The neural mechanisms that perform the operations which permit me to
identify experiences and to classify these with other earlier experiences
determine my faculty to recognize (Re-cognition). Those mechanisms and
operations which allow me to make symbolic representations of these
experiences, say, in the form of utterances, determine my faculty to recall
(Re-call).
The hierarchy of mechanisms, transformational operations and processes
that lead from sensation over perception of particulars to the manipulation
of generalized internal representations of the perceived, as well as the
inverse transformations that lead from general commands to specific
actions, or from general concepts to specific utterances I shall call “Cogni-