The Interaction Of Perceptual Categorisation and Value-Category Memory Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 118-9):

A third and critical evolutionary development provides a sufficient means for the appearance of primary consciousness. This is a special reentrant circuit that emerged during evolution as a new component of neuroanatomy. This circuit allows for continual reentrant signalling between the value-category memory and the ongoing global mappings that are concerned with perceptual categorisation in real time. 

An animal without these new reentrant connections can carry out perceptual categorisations in various sensory modalities and can even develop a conceptual value-category memory. Such an animal cannot, however, link perceptual events into an ongoing scene. 

With the appearance of the new reentrant circuits in each modality, a conceptual categorisation of concurrent perceptions can occur before these perceptual signals contribute lastingly to that memory. This interaction between a special kind of memory and perceptual categorisation gives rise to primary consciousness. 

Given the appropriate reentrant circuits in the brain, this "bootstrapping process" takes place in all sensory modalities in parallel and simultaneously, thus allowing for the construction of a complex scene. The coherence of this scene is coordinated by the conceptual value-category memory even if the individual perceptual categorisation events that contribute to it are causally independent.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the interaction between ongoing perceptual categorisation and value-category memory, that gives rise to primary consciousness, is the correlation of ongoing construals of experience as instances of perceptual meaning with the value-weighted system of perceptual potential.