The ouruborus of perception #

Sense making is filtered through a perceiving mind #

This process impacts all understanding. #

People are individually complex — we are beings of networked, stratified, and variable processing. That processing affects the data we see, the filters we apply, the patterns and processes we develop, and the outcomes of our cogitation.

When we are moving through the world, our reference point is in multiple dimensions: the physical environment, our physical and emotional state, and time are the most prevalent. To get to from point A to point B, you have to navigate the physical interchanges. To navigate those points, you are experiencing time — which, depending on the context and the points in question, could shift the points as you are moving between them. And during all this, you could be focused and attentive, you could be distracted, you could be daydreaming about a potential happening, or crying over something that already happened. These are aspects of our environment. 

These inputs are particular aspects of the environment and our concurrent reactive states. We’re responding to it as we move through it, accessing different data points as we move physically down a street. Part of the process of responding is the matrix in which we perceive.

That’s what the ouruborus of perception is: the process of responding according to the matrix in which we perceive and the network underlying our processing chain.

Remember, a process is an information structure that is overall in one direction, but can have offshoots and complexities within it until it converges on an end state. A matrix is a bidirectional information structure. A network is omnidirectional. In this instance, the diagram names the deeper structures but doesn’t detail them: creating a node out of a matrix and creating a node out of a process that linearizes and adds to a network. It's all to place it in the more encompassing process. Information can be simplified, but the simplification only smooths over the continued complexity. If it culls the information in the complexity, it no longer adheres to reality.

Once it’s all brought together? We’re making bets. Ad hoc, only with ourselves, but bets through time nonetheless. 

We have bet, historically, on what memories have been processed in such a way as to be sparked in this moment. We have bet on the cognitive biases that help us weed through the information we’re swimming through. 

In the moment of perception, we are betting on the adaptability and fungibility of our mental models. We’re also betting on our internal information architectures that allow that ad hoc processing to be organized into the most useful spaces in our mind. 

Then we will be betting on our forward motion, whether through space/action or with our mental leaps and decisions. We also will be betting as we create synopsis pivot points — nuggetizing — so that we can better encapsulate our experience for the next step.

And around. And around. And around again, feeding itself and recalibrating as experience, and our perception of it, dictates.

The outcome? We are in a constant state of developing patterns to get a shorthand in memory to more easily communicate and access later.

The real kicker? Most of us tend to leverage our ouruborus of perception to try to understand our personal ouruborus of perception, and none of it with attentive self-awareness.

We see what we’ve trained ourselves to see, even in ourselves.