Representation and reality

I am reading an interesting book (just published) by Andy Clark, “The Experience Machine….” about the now well-established fact that our perception works by predicting continuity and transmitting only to correct prediction errors – and then only what is currently relevant, because of limited band-width. One fact I didn’t know and one I knew but didn’t connect before. There are +/- 4 times as many neural circuits from brain to perceptual organs as from perception to brain. Aha! Explains a lot. And – broadcast engineers greatly increase capacity by using the same assumption. My first publication was a critique of naïve attempts to apply information theory to human communication (and my first book an expansion of that critique) but I failed to see how that one wholly justified and useful application of Information Theory might apply to human perception and conversation. (So did everybody else at the time.) From another interesting book, Enfield “The Way We Talk”: It takes a half second to understand an utterance and a half second to formulate a reply – painfully long - so keep conversation moving, we all maintain a representation of the conversation and use it to predict what the current speaker will say and when they will finish – and to maintain and constantly up-date our potential replies, so we can jump in as soon as they finish. If they surprise us, “um” or “uh” or an equivalent will hold the floor while we re-formulate the (erroneously) prepared reply. We live and act in a world we imagine, partially (as relevant) updated by our limited-capacity senses. Because our brains and neural circuits are slow, we experience the past and act in the future. I’m not sure what we mean, then, by “the present.”