The Evolution

The Evolution
6

of what it is seeing—the particular objects and events—or other-
wise the information it gathers will be useless.

The raw data it gathers are perceptions of such things as round-
ness and squareness, redness and greenness, smoothness and unevenness,
darkness and brightness, which in themselves mean nothing, and which
are only of value because they occur in patterns that reflect the
objects and events of the physical world. Accordingly, before memory
can begin the task of anticipation, it must disambiguate the stimulus
it is perceiving; it must, in other words, make a guess at the physical
event that it is being confronted with (disambiguation), and only then
form a guess as to which physical event is going to occur next
(anticipation).

This process necessarily requires that memory take the colors,
shapes, and textures it perceives and combine them into single wholes
that have a one-to-one correspondence with the physical objects and
events of the world. These wholes must in turn be linked with each
other according to the dictates of experience, thereby building in
memory an internal representation of the external world that allows it
to make accurate guesses about what object or event is most likely to
occur next.

All of this defines an important rule regarding the organization
of memory: Memory must have the ability to link together color,
shape, and texture in such a way as to form a new whole capable of
forming links distinct from the links of its parts.

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