Brains working towards machine consciousness

 I blame @DaveOWhite and @FrancesBell for this line of thought, although it had occurred to me some time ago (during the CCK08 course, if not before). 

In a world of consensual reality, we negotiate meaning through social interaction.  Indeed, we negotiate the reality itself, but that is a slightly different matter.  Each one of us maintains a model in our heads of what different words (or concepts) mean.  In order to be able to successfully communicate with others, we need to be able to establish a level of agreement about those meanings.  As we interact with different people,from different backgrounds and with different life experiences, our meanings of things get tugged in different directions.  As @FrancesBell has just commented “temporary convergences of truth are useful posts to cling on to as we try to cross the river of emergent meanings;)” – they provide anchorage and grounding.  I really like that because it also emphasises that we cannot, necessarily, rely on the convergence remaining fixed.

(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mandel_zoom_14_satellite_julia_island.jpg CC-SA 3.0 licence)

The Mandelbrot set is a complex attractor – and this is a part of it.  The colours represent how quickly a point will escape from the set itself, under repetition of a simple mathematical formula.  The dynamics of convergence of meaning are likely to be much more complicated, and complex, than this. 

(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mandel_zoom_07_satellite.jpg  CC-SA 3.0 licence) and the ‘overall’ picture is:

(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mandel_zoom_00_mandelbrot_set.jpg CC-SA 3.0 licence)

There is similarity between the views, as is in the nature of fractals, but they are also quite different.  As we negotiate meaning, do we find the same types of change happen as we look at the fine-grained detail of a concept?  Is our internal, personal, interpretation of a thing, word or concept the actual meaning, or does the meaning belong to the collection of individuals – existing in the emergent connections between us, quite possibly never fully graspable by any one individual?

One of the things I am trying to do is to analyse the trajectory of concepts in meaning-space.  I doubt that sentence provides much clarity, but it may serve as an attractor to some...