Making Up Our Minds

Explore a thought-provoking conference talk that delves into the concept of perceived objects and cognitive ontology as observer-relative inferential constructs. Examine how disciplines such as computer science, cognitive science, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, and fundamental physics have developed empirically-supported formal models supporting this idea. Discover how these models can be applied to an agent's metacognition about itself, suggesting that "minds," thoughts, beliefs, desires, and memories are constructed in the same way as the external world and its objects. Investigate the process of constructing these mental constructs using the physical language of holographic encoding and the mathematical language of sheaf theory and condensed objects. Focus on time perception, episodic memory, and planning within this framework. Learn about a formal approach that proposes both retrospective and prospective memories are pure constructs from the present, reconstructed on-demand moment to moment. Understand the specific empirical prediction made by this approach regarding neural mechanisms implementing a particular functor acting on sheaves of categorizations of observed events.