A conscious process of perception, cognition, and decision-making
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Conifold Theory provides a step-by-step process for engaging in perception, information processing, and decision-making. This framework for understanding the relationship between the brain and the mind builds on the work of researchers Karl Friston and John Boyd [23, 24]. The engagement cycle guides an individual to accurately perceive reality - attending to important factors rather than distractors - and identify semantical statements about the most likely state of the world. These percepts, or semantical statements, are then integrated into temporal sequences to form predicted cause-effect models of reality, or syntactical relationships between events. An individual might use these constructed mental models of reality to decide on behavioral actions which are most likely to meet their strategic objectives. Once an action is implemented, the individual may continue to engage with reality by starting the cycle again, honing their actions to continually improve goal-directed behavior. This process is called the engagement cycle, because it helps a person to effectively engage with reality through sensorimotor feedback loops (as shown in Figure 2).
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OBSERVE: The first step of the engagement cycle is to observe reality, making use of all available sensory apparatus. Building a model of reality to operate within begins by expending energy to perceive reality.
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ORIENT: The next step is to orient toward salient stimuli, discarding irrelevant stimuli. It takes practice to parse the two, but making this distinction improves efficiency, especially in cases where energy is limited or the timing of a task is critical. In other situations, it may be worthwhile to expend energy to pay attention to seemingly irrelevant stimuli.
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VERIFY: A single computational cycle is complete when a semantic truth statement can be asserted. This factual statement encodes meaning and represents a perceived event. For example, the perceived event may be a loud noise and a bright flash of light occurring simultaneously. This cohesive perception can be stored in memory, in case the information holds predictive value for subsequent events - particularly events which affect survival risk to the individual. For example, this combination of sensory stimuli may indicate that a bomb has gone off, or it may indicate the annual fireworks display has started. Contextual expectations help to guide a quick and accurate response to the situation.
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CONSTRUCT: As computational cycles are completed, these can be sequenced together, into a hypothetical cause-effect relationship between events, encoded by a sequence of neural network states. Over time, many of these sequences or predictive models of the world are constructed. This set of predictive models is the knowledge gained from experience, and this knowledge set guides decision-making. By gaining more information, and building more predictive models, the individual gains experience, and becomes better able to select the most contextually-appropriate tactic. And yet, it is important to note that this set of beliefs (while useful) may not be completely accurate, as information may have been missed or not taken into account when devising a mental model. For this reason, it is important to remain behaviorally flexible - open to receiving new information and trying new approaches to achieve one's goals.
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CONSIDER: Once predictive models of reality have been constructed, these models can be assessed for how well they meet the strategic objective(s). If the goal (e.g. achieving physical safety) is not reached, additional information can be taken into account and new behavioral tactics can be employed.
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DECIDE: Once multiple predictive models of reality have been considered, an individual or organization can decide which optimal tactics should be deployed to meet the strategic objective(s).
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IMPLEMENT: Once a decision is made, purposeful and deliberate action must be taken to implement the chosen tactics.
FEEDBACK LOOPS: An individual may wisely choose to reiterate the engagement cycle in order to continuously monitor the external response to particular tactics, updating the predictive model accordingly, as new information arrives. This hewing to reality – by expanding perceptual awareness, attentional focus, and conscious decision-making – permits the individual to regularly increase the amount of information available, without resulting in data overload, because irrelevant data is constantly being discarded as useful information is amplified and refined. The end result of this strategic approach is to act more effectively within reality and therefore meet the desired objectives.