For Whom the Bell Tolls

The majority of our experience is lost to consciousness. All nerves are set to sense and signal with only a special few (still millions!) interfacing with our external environment.

The parochial idea of "the senses" includes the main 5 but can easily be extended, adding balance, introception and proprioception at least.

These "main" receptors are attuned to variation as "difference" at some threshold. In homeostasis they are either not signaling or are signaling in a frequency that does not trigger a response.

Our sense of the World is then the averaging of these signals with focus on aspects/inputs that drive avoidance and attainment behaviors.

Not So Much a Line

The range of our sensations are great. For any one sensory channel, triggers are tripped by relative to differences in the state of the nerve and your own focus.

Because we model the World, the nature of "focus" changes with our perception of the environment. A warm caressing touch could create desirous ecstasy or repulsive dread. Much depends on our attuned mechanisms of perception.

This make for an odd definition of pain and pleasure. Perception must come into play which affords us personal "discernment". This mean that "absolutes" are few.

The Regulator Tells the Story

Our personal narrative sets the stage for how we perceive our senses. We are bound to certain physical limits which may be absolutes like mortal wounds but most of life is lived in a range of "interpretable" stimuli.

This means we can approximate desired outcomes by acting in "forecast" or "future" mode. We feel how we feel we will be and act as our own shepherd.

We are actually lauded for this type of behavior, calling it "purposeful" and "willful". At the same time it begs and question of how NOW is contorted in the fantasy of tomorrow.

So Much to Do, So Little Time

The very nature of a Good Regulator is that it must "regulate" i.e. initiate some responsive action! The old theory of "Rational Man" would have us calculating the trajectories and forces while driving headlong into another car. We just don't take everything into consideration.

This approximating involves balancing the diminishing returns of effort in attaining "the perfect answer" with the inevitability of a "closing" event the passing of opportunity to act. This is called "satificing" behavior.

But it is not all chance and satificing.

In our perceptual nature the Regulator not only makes estimates of acts NOW and expected outcomes, it makes and estimate of the probability that our effort will create the desired outcome. This means we may perceive that we are ineffectual and do not "try" or that we are invincible and try for the last time...

This is called Expectancy Theory and it is another crucial mechanism that binds our model of ourselves and the model of the world in a matrix of self-story.