Cognitive Space

Being a continuation of matters raised in "The Emergence of Cognition", a somewhat fanciful and far-fetched tale of survival, and how this has left us with wits far too quick for their own good, and what are we going to do now, when the 'enemy', it seems, is no longer saber-toothed tigers and monstrous slithery pythons, but us? One outcome of the emergence of cognition is that things happen in a certain way, part of which is that there is a strong resemblance between how we obtain information about the world around us, and how we represent and 'use' that information in our moment-to-moment thinking and experiencing. We have decided to call the ways in which we obtain information "sensory modalities", and like most of the words we use we are often not very clear about whether we use this phrase to mean the process of obtaining that information (the sensory mechanism or 'channel'), or the kind of information that that particular mechanism allows us to have. Of course, we do this all the time, with everything. I think I know what I mean by a certain word, a certain phrase; I assume that you know what I mean; and when we get into a state of confusion or misunderstanding we are more apt to drop the matter, and both walk away muttering, than to dissect it out and find out what kind of a fix our language, or rather the way we use our language, has landed us in this time. And we have decided to call the ways in which information is represented inside, inside our heads and inside our 'cognitive space'; we have decided to call them "cognitive modalities". Not that our thinking or our experience is cognitive modalities, even though some seem to prefer this view, any more than our experience of the world is sensory modalities, or some combination of the separate kinds of input that our sensory mechanisms provide to us. What we experience is a complicated, multi-dimensional, being-and-happening kind of a world, synthesized by some process or processes that takes what we 'know', what we 'believe', what we 'remember', and especially what we 'expect', and interprets what the world shows us long before we get to experience anything at all.