<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # Many of the highest human faculties resemble... > **Many of the highest human faculties resemble useful departures from ordinary cognitive constraint rather than perfectly regulated functions.** {{Imagination is perception loosened from immediate sensory reality; counterfactual reasoning is cognition constructing conditions that do not presently exist; play suspends immediate utility; creativity crosses boundaries that established categories ordinarily keep apart; and scientific discovery repeatedly begins when an anomaly survives the pressure to be ignored.}} {{Intelligence advances because the mind can entertain possibilities that reality has not yet confirmed.}} {{A nervous system capable only of reproducing what previous experience has taught it could become extraordinarily competent at yesterday while remaining helpless before tomorrow.}} {{Freedom may not be the absence of constraint, but the capacity to generate, examine, and sometimes preserve useful departures from constraint.}} {{Higher-order cognition can subject departures from established behavioral and conceptual constraints to selection, rejecting most, stabilizing some, and occasionally transforming an improbable deviation into a new behavior, invention, moral position, scientific theory, or way of seeing the world.}} {{Noise can become exploration, disobedience can become adaptation, and an error in prediction can become the beginning of a new ontology.}} **Source:** [[breakouts/Human Machine|Human Machine]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Many of the highest human faculties resemble useful departures from ordinary cognitive constraint rather than perfectly regulated functions. Imagination is perception loosened from immediate sensory reality; counterfactual reasoning is cognition constructing conditions that do not presently exist; play suspends immediate utility; creativity crosses boundaries that established categories ordinarily keep apart; and scientific discovery repeatedly begins when an anomaly survives the pressure to be ignored. Intelligence advances because the mind can entertain possibilities that reality has not yet confirmed. A nervous system capable only of reproducing what previous experience has taught it could become extraordinarily competent at yesterday while remaining helpless before tomorrow. Freedom may not be the absence of constraint, but the capacity to generate, examine, and sometimes preserve useful departures from constraint. Higher-order cognition can subject departures from established behavioral and conceptual constraints to selection, rejecting most, stabilizing some, and occasionally transforming an improbable deviation into a new behavior, invention, moral position, scientific theory, or way of seeing the world. Noise can become exploration, disobedience can become adaptation, and an error in prediction can become the beginning of a new ontology.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-highest-human-faculties-beginning-new-ontology ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->