The timing of conscious states

We have established that consciousness is a hybrid process, consisting of neural hierarchies which compute accessible semantic states of mind. These semantic states are further subdivided, depending on referred temporality. Present time (ie contemporaneous) semantic states are called 'perception'. Past semantic states are called 'memories'. Future (ie expected) semantic states are called 'beliefs'. Memories and beliefs are sometimes lumped together for convenience and referred to as 'knowledge'.

But these semantic states must be computed with finite neural resources. Recall that in the introduction to GOLEM theory, consciousness is described as a 'movie-like' process that occurs while the mind plans and executes behaviour. It so happens that consciousness is very 'compute intensive', to use some 'geekspeak' jargon, such that it takes almost half a second to compute each new 'movie frame'. But our introspective experience of consciousness is for the most part seamless and continuous. Clearly, some serious interpolation ('filling in') between 'movie frames' is being performed. It turns out that there are several related psychological observations (see below) that are explained by means of the mind's smooth interpolation of the underlying discontinuous computations of conscious states. 

The colour phi phenomenon [1] is the fact that, when apparent motion is induced between objects with different colours, the colour of the apparently moving object abruptly changes midway along the path. It is a perceptual illusion in which a disembodied perception of motion is produced by a succession of still images.

The phi phenomenon denotes a subset of experiments in which perception and reality diverge. The phi set of related illusions are based on interpolative processes, but there are also illusions which arise from alterpolative (attributive) processes. Michotte [2] showed that simple visual stimuli could give the impression of a causal connection between events. McGurk & McDonald showed that vision and hearing are both capable of influencing speech perception [3]. 

Clearly, something or someone is 'curating' appearances so as to maximise perceived level of belief. Is this curator a centralised, paternalistic entity or decentralised non-egocentric processes?  I believe the answer is given by the neocybernetic (autonormative) principles which underwrite the novel functionality of the GOLEM-NEODE cog. These principles represent the actions of a decentralised regulatory (heterostatic) framework. 

1. Kolers, Paul A.; von Grünau, Michael (1976). "Shape and color in apparent motion". Vision Research. 16 (4): 329-335

2. Michotte, A. E. D. (1963). The Perception of Causality (English Translation of Michotte, 1954. Transl. by T. R. Miles and E. Miles, London: Methuen.

3. McGurk, H. and MacDonald, J. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing voices, Nature 264, 746-748

4. a closed-form description is a symbolic equation which contains no hidden mutually recursive terms. It is graphically equivalent to an open (ie no cycles) spanning/parse  tree, which can then be computationally implemented by direct means eg linear matrix operations