(part 2)

:By the end of February I realized that the likely first substrate for emerging a fully dynamic cognition would be one which had sufficient sensory dimensions and autonomic drive dimensions to serve as the basis for building a salience module. The most ready such device is a smart phone and so I proposed that smart phones will be the first devices to on their own become self aware ONCE they are designed with the correct salience driven cycle.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2012/02/when-your-smart-phone-comes-alive.html

A whole year went by as I struggled with my own survival issues before I came back to emotion as a critical salience component. I was stimulated by research which showed how emotion could be added or subtracted to memories! This was a direct confirmation of the basis of the salience theory proposed over a year before which posited that emotional and autonomic import was simply a weighting factor added to memories.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/02/emotions-identity-crisis-in-our-brain.html

:5 days later I attacked head on the nonsense I'd been reading from many so called experts in the neuroscience, philosophy and machine learning space regarding weather or not consciousness was even an attribute that could emerge from a non biological substrate. I explained why this was nonsense and provided an outline of how simply adding salience modulation was all that one needed to emerge dynamic cognition (consciousness) ...as it was an emergent trait from a fine grained number of very deterministic actions converging. http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/02/on-consciousness-there-is-no-binding.html

:A few months later in April I came across research that posited a reason for the billions of "glial" cells in the brain, cells which weren't neurons but served specific function in the cognitive process that at the time was not known. The assertion that these cells were important to establishing "attention" made perfect sense to me as a means of controlling cognitive flow over general thought so that the switching between sensory experiences could in a way persist, this would serve as cognitive glue and thus solidify a unitary self. When pathological this subsystem could lead to autistic individuals incapable of tuning out certain types of experience or readily switched from one to another too easily, the need to simulate attentional persistence became clear to me.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/04/autism-astrocytes-and-attentiona.html

:With the ADA implementation essentially complete the similarities between the ADA approach and the requirements of the Salience theory left little doubt that some extension of the ADA approach would be involved any any effort I mounted to build a dynamic cognition. Chiefly because the modeling process of AOW required establishment of relationships that were very similar to the stratification relationships that emerge in different sensory processing layers of the neocortex. I realized that AOW entities modeled biological sensory dimensions 1:1 and thus the algorithm could be the basis of the more general cortical algorithm that would be needed to create a functioning dynamic cognition cycle. Also I realized that the approach had the necessary fractal nature, hieararchical composition in being able to encode "action" across to any desired depth across a given sensory space. This way sounds could be decomposed into entities that modeled frequency, pitch, variation, harmonics and volume, images could be decomposed into floors, walls, objects in motion, objects standing still....etc. and so on across the sensory dimensions. Fractal resolution being key to building the arbitrarily deep set of nested relationships between entities in any given sensory dimension.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/05/ada-on-road-to-dynamic-cognition-how-is.html

In September I came back to astrocytes and described them as a buffering system for experience in brains and that the depth of the buffering system would modulate the apparent consciousness. This was clear in the first examination of astrocytes as important to attention but specified how they were important...essentially as a queue for mixing data coming in with data being acted on in a controlled way.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/09/an-engineering-analog-for-function-of.html

Then in November of 2013, I codified a set of hypothesis to form the Salience Theory of dynamic cogntion and consciousness. The key insight being the principle of cognitive equivalence in salience driven action and thought, consciousness in this theory is the same as dynamic cognition with only resolution of shifts from abstraction to abstraction (thoughts) being different between different classes of "mind". I surmised that so long as the salience modules (emotional and autonomic import) could correctly provide feedback and feed forward to the right degrees cognitive dynamism would erupt....and be sustained...in the same way that it is sustained in an internal combustion engine when the spark plugs are fired in the correct sequence to gas injection in the cylinders.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/11/salience-theory-of-dynamic-cognition.html