I hope you did your homework. And so do you believe in the colour blue? And /or all the other colours out there?

It’s astonishing how close to the surface of things a Central Paradox can be found. The answer is that colours do exist, because we perceive and experience them, yet they don’t exist, because objectively if there was no mind process to perceive them they would not be colours – whatever else they might be.

This is not mere sophistry. The fact is, things and phenomena do exist independently, but have no existence as concepts unless a mind perceives them. So the tree in the garden is there when there’s nobody about, but it’s a nameless non-concept until some old josser comes stumbling through the undergrowth and his dog pisses on it.

This kind of mental urogymnastic becomes slightly easier if we consider a sensory modality that’s less dominant – the sense of smell, for example. Does the green (hmm!) cheese on the moon smell if there’s nobody on the moon to smell it? It’s not rocket science to leap to the conclusion: where there is no olfaction there ain’t no pong neither.

So all of that is a prelude to my Theory of the Meaning of Meaningfulness. I think we can be reasonably comfortable with the notion that our senses generate perception when they get the right kind of signals, once those have been subjected to the right kind of processing by a whole lot of marvellously efficient systems in the brain. And yet at the same time we are perfectly at ease in accepting that what we experience is reality.

“To put that in a nut-case,” said Coco, “Are you telling me, O Great Platonico-Avuncular Theorist, that we can believe simultaneously and synchronologistically that what we see or experience is real, while yet knowing perfectly well that the entirety of what we experience is generated by brain-processes forming some kind of substrate for the mind?”

“Good Dog!” I replied, “I think you’re on the scent of the Theory of the Meaning of Meaningfulness. Do have a biscuit.”

If we first accept that colours are internally generated mental constructs, Coco and I now suggest that one of the central drivers in the human mind, and come to think of it, the canine mind also, is Meaningfulness.

In a sense, everything we experience has a value attribution created and attached as we process it through Mind. Things that relate to survival, and to intense emotion in any form, have a high Meaningfulness value. Coco and I assert, on the basis of our considerable experiences (mine concerning 65 years of unceasing enquiry and his involving a large number of stinky things in the wood, nothing wrong with that, Coco), that the centrality of the Meaningfulness sensation is related to its value in terms of survival.

“So we survive,” said Coco, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but spoiling the impression somewhat by drooling in non-Pavlovian but Labradoric fashion, “by virtue of our mind-generated Meaningfulnessh?”

“Precisely, my dear Coco,” I replied. “That is exactly the meaning of Meaningfulness. It is a real yet mind-generated sensation, with an external utility closely related to preservation of the individual and of his or her immediate family. That's my Theory, anyway.”

Coming shortly: But what does Meaningfulness feel like when it’s at home, Uncle Donnie?

Mental Modelling

My dog and I were thinking the other day that one of the main keys to expertise, apart from constant practice, is mental modelling.

He's a choc labrador, in case you were wondering, but anyway a while back I found that giving a successful anaesthetic, as one used to do in order to keep the wolf from the door (no offence, Coco) involved not just careful planning, but visualising in detail the sequence of events as the procedure proceeded. Then one would preview what might happen and what one might do, and in this way collage together a workable scenario, some of which was based on pre-op tests and prior knowledge of physiological science and years of experience, and some was "black box" (ie you know what goes in and you know what comes out, but **** knows what happens in between) - and this mental model was then played in parallel with the actual events, and from time to frequent time a comparison was made between a frame of the model and a frame of reality, with the model being adjusted or amended.

I suppose you thought anaesthetists did bugger all but sit about reading the Financial Times while taking surreptitious sniffs of the volatile agents, but anyhow after a few years of this Theory I realised I was doing exactly the same thing when playing the guitar in a wee jazz band, "playing" to be more accurate, the process involving being aware of where the harmony was (purely thanks to the bassist, otherwise I would have had no clue), improvising something 'somewhere in the brains', sticking that something in some kind of buffer, and while that was getting played by the hands, thinking of another 2 bars worth. Nothing fantooosh about this, footballers do it all the time, only with their feet.

So mental modelling, if you're still paying attention, is a key feature of human expertise, and the signs are that this may apply to dogs also. Contemporaneous accounts indicate that people like da Vinci and can't remember, think it was Robert Hooke (somewhere in Aubrey's Brief Lives) spent a lot of time in an extreme dwam or Brown Study, and my Theory is that they were Mentally Modelling. Which brings me back to Coco, because as he says, why should the greats have all the fun, we can read their blogs and rip off their techniques.

Ooops, sorry. The Meaning of Meaningfulness, I'm just coming to that in a wee while.

Meantime, Happy Theorising!

First of all please have a look at the photograph and see/think what you think/see.

A chance combination of whin bushes, snow, wind, earth from an early ploughing, come together and create something that it's hard not to see as a beast with dark coat. I added two simple strokes with a stick to complete the image. Quite reminiscent of palaeolithic cave-paintings, where the artists often used convex forms in the rock to suggest animal forms & outlines.

Uncle Donnie's Theory Part One: we have the capacity to create expectations which configure our perceptions much more efficiently than we commonly notice. I would go further, m'lud, and assert that without such an astonishing facility to project (or, as some might allege, imagine), we would spend all day trying to make out the most obvious and common sights, sounds and who the hell is that in my bed?

Coming shortly, the Meaning of Meaningfulness. Homework: Do you believe in the colour blue?

- Just a theory.

DrDx