Emotional Grounding (still under construction - do not cite)

(a)                                                                                (b)

Figure S.1

The meaning of a compound representation is the sum of the meaning of its constituent parts.  This is how both consciousness and language, its externalised intersubjective form, perform their magic. Both individual components ( eg low-level senses like pain, touch) and complex hierarchical representations made from these components (eg the thought that 'ouch, that hurts') are semantic states, defined as grounded (usually via some form of embodiment) percept classes. Science doesn't currently understand consciousness for precisely the same reason it doesn't understand language- they are both powered by the same mechanism.

Consider the semantic state hierarchy (SSH) which exists within a 'higher' animal's, or human's brain. It contains ('subsumes') smaller SSHs, not unlike those which form the minds of lesser creatures. Originally, minds (semantic state hierarchies) evolved to EXTEND THE SPATIAL RANGE (NEAR,FAR) OF SENSORY INPUT AND TEMPORAL RANGE (PAST, FUTURE) OF STORED MEMORIES. The aim was to better use the past to predict the future[1].

1. The GOLEM ABI thinks via inner language, by storing information as subjective experiences (hierarchical autobiographical codes) through a compositional system of discrete symbols. GOLEM is unusual, but not unique. At Stanford, for example, the nominally similar Hudson & Manning model operates over a vocabulary of embedded concepts, atomic semantic units that represent aspects of the world - see Learning By Abstraction: The Neural State Machine. Drew Hudson & Christopher Manning. (2019) Stanford University.

The formalism of statecharts, invented by David Harel in the 1980s, addresses exactly this shortcoming of the conventional FSMs.1 Statecharts provide a very efficient way of sharing behavior, so that the complexity of a statechart no longer explodes but tends to faithfully represent the complexity of the reactive system it describes. Obviously, formalism like this is a godsend to embedded systems programmers (or any programmers working on reactive systems), because it makes the state machine approach truly applicable to real-life problems.

Moore automata are used, because they associate actions with states, not transitions. The types of finite state machines that associate actions with transitions are called Mealy machines. Moore automata are synchronous (coarse grained control) while Mealy machines are asynchronous (fine-grained control). 

Reactive Programming

• Events and Reactions
• Event Queues
• State Machines
• Run-to-Completion
• Active Objects

UML Statecharts

• States and Transitions
• Guard Conditions
• Actions and Reactions
• Entry and Exit Actions

Design Patterns

• Ultimate Hook
• Reminder
• Deferred Event
• Orthogonal Component
• Transition to History

Frameworks

• Inversion of Control
• Event Delivery
• Garbage Collection
• Time and Power

Related Topics

• Common Pitfalls
• Preemption and Priority
• Software Tracing
• Debug and Test

There is a fundamental misunderstanding concerning the meanings of the terms 'semantics' and 'syntax'. I call this cognitive error the 'fundamental misunderstanding of linguistics'. Briefly, it is the idea that language is a group of meaning-bearing sounds. In fact, the main role of language is internal, ie thought is made from linguistic units- we hesitate to call them words because of the obvious confusion this would cause.

Consider the model depicted in figure 1a. This is a model of memory which is consistent with the research of Endel Tulving. It consists of two levels, an upper semantic level, and a lower syntactic level. It also consists of two sides, that is, it is lateralised just like our brain, and for similar reasons. The left side consists of single or unique entities, while the right side allows for multiple, similar but not identical entities. The left upper side contains episodic or autobiographical data structures, representations of one individual's (ie the subject's) experiences. The right upper side includes the experiences of other subjects, which the primary subject has learned about from third party observation (in anaimals and humans), as well as linguistic communication (in humans only). Because of the automatic upwards entailment property of the entries (percept categories) in this memory, this upper right side becomes a useful store of general knowledge, ie facts. While the left side contains records of experiences (facts plus the circumstances of their acquisition), the right side only contains facts that are mutually concurrent. The right side cannot contain the learning experiences associated with all the newly acquired facts because this one individual only has access to its own experiences. Summarising, left ('wet') side stores memory content plus its personal context, while right ('dry') side stores memory content only.

The purpose of the single/multiple entity division will become clearer when we examine the lower regions of this hierarchical memory system. The memory system has four levels, with the instinctual level[0] at the bottom. The label for this level is neuroendocrine, because it describes the metabolic aspects of an organism's mind. The next level up, level[1] consists of entities that are conditioned version of the lower, instinctual ones. At the left, motor side are UCR or conditioned responses. At the right, sensor-side, are UCS or unconditioned stimuli. We use the asterisks to indicate acronymic or symbolic plurality, to avoid the potential for confusion that arises when writing apostrophe-s. Sometimes, it is better to write IS and IR to mean instinctive stimuli and responses, instead of the slightly less accurate 'unconditioned'. We will use the latter formalism, but the reader should be aware that most other texts still use UC% to indicate the instinctual adjectival.