<!-- 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]] <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->