Strong categorization

Categorization is the lumping of different objects or events into the same bucket based on their similarity based on some criterion or purpose. For example, whether a tomato is categorized as a fruit or a vegetable depends on what you are trying to do with it and what aspects of the tomato are relevant to your interests. Categorization is crucial for how organisms successfully navigate their environments because they need to be able to efficiently ignore the irrelevant details of a complicated world.

One way that categorization could happen is to have the brain consider some object or event, compare it to an existing list of historically learned categories, and assign the object or event to whichever category seems most fitting. This is a weak anticipation version of categorization, which we could call weak categorization.

Strong categorization would be categorization that arises from strong anticipation, specifically a strong internal model. This kind of categorization doesn’t involve any labeling—no “fruit”, “vegetable”, etc. Instead, it’s categorization in a behaviorist sense: the processes and effects of strong categorization match onto what categorization is supposed to do.

Normally, we think of categorization as assigning something to a bucket based on its superficial features—a dog is furry, so it’s a mammal. In the theory of constructed emotion, however, categorization is a high-level organizing principle that constructs an allostatic strategy. A category organizes a collection of signals into a meaningful pattern. It aligns action with the body and the world. Superficial feature match doesn’t matter. Action preparation does.

Strong categorization is this same process but without any need for a brain, or a brain-equivalent, to make a decision from which the effects of categorization flows. Strong categories don’t have names and don’t particularly correspond to the concepts humans normally use to think about the world. Instead, a strong category is just a repeatedly stabilized pattern of interaction. The system doesn’t have a decision-making layer that chooses an appropriate category that then guides the behavior of the rest of the system. Instead, the strong category is simply a pattern that a system settles into, like a rock rolling downhill, when it best satisfies constraints pertaining to the external environment, internal milieu, task, and structured space of patterns. There’s no categorization→action sequence. Categorization is the organizing pattern of action.

Weak categories, as in the theory of constructed emotion, are predictions. Strong categories are stable patterns of behavior that have an anticipatory, or negative phase, relationship with the environment because that’s what’s stable.

In dynamical systems terms, a category behaves like an order parameter of the organism–environment system. It summarizes and stabilizes a coordinated pattern of interaction across many degrees of freedom. Indeed, order parameters and strong categorization may be the same thing. An order parameter describes the essential task-relevant features of an interacting pattern of behavior, allowing extraneous details to be defined and ignored (ignoring them is the definition), just like a category. In systems described by multiple order parameters, the category is the full dynamical regime over the system described by the network of order parameters, i.e., the cognitive glue.

An example of a strong category is perseverative reaching exhibited by infants. Infants repeatedly reach to a location A where a toy was previously hidden rather than a location B where they saw the toy currently hidden. As various experiments have shown, this is not because of a weak category—a mistaken belief that the toy is at location A—but a strong category. The infant perseverates because they have formed a stable attractor where reaching to A is the stable way to maintain coordination across the body, environment, and task.

Strong categorization massively opens up the space of possible categorizers. While weak categorization has been traditionally restricted to brains, strong categorization emerges in the lawful interactions between coupled elements in a system. Any physical system that is able to find a stable pattern of relationships is a candidate for a categorizer.