What Is Memory that It May Have Hindsight and Foresight as well? - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 105

tive Processes”. In the analysis of these processes we should be prepared
to find that terms like “recall” and “recognition”—as convenient as they
may be for referring quickly to certain aspects of cognition—are useless as
descriptors of actual processes and mechanisms that can be identified in the
functional organization of nervous tissue.
It could be that already at this point of my exposé the crucial significance
of cognitive processes may have become visible, namely, to supply an organ-
ism with the operations that “lift”—so to say—the information from its car-
riers, the signals, may they be sensations of external or internal events, signs
or symbols, 11 and to provide the organism with mechanisms that allow it
to compute inferences from the information so obtained.
To use more colloquial terms, cognition may well be identified with all
the processes that establish “meaning” from experience. I may mention that
a somewhat generalized interpretation of “meaning” as “all that which can
be inferred from a signal” leads to a semantic rationale of considerable
analytic power, independent of whether the signal is a sign or a symbol.
Moreover, I may add in passing that this interpretation allows not only for
qualitative distinctions of “meaning” depending on the mode of inference
that is operative—i.e., the deductive, inductive or abductive mode 12 —
but also for quantitative estimates of the “amount of meaning”—straight-
forwardly at least in the deductive mode 13 —that is carried by a given signal
for a given recipient.
I hope to make these points more transparent later on in the develop-
ment of my thesis which, after these preliminary remarks, we are ready to
hear now.
II. Thesis
In the stream of cognitive processes one can conceptually isolate certain
components, for instance
(i) the faculty to perceive,
(ii) the faculty to remember,
and (iii) the faculty to infer.
But if one wishes to isolate these faculties functionally or locally, one is
doomed to fail. Consequently, if the mechanisms that are responsible for
any of these faculties are to be discovered, then the totality of cognitive
processes must be considered.
Before going on with a detailed defense of this thesis by developing a
model of an “integrated functional circuit” for cognition, let me briefly
suggest the inseparability of these faculties on two simple examples.
First Example: If only one of the three faculties mentioned above is
omitted, the system is devoid of cognition: