The processing systems of the sensors and the brain, the feature detectors and the integrators, the comparators and the models for comparison all derive their capacities from the exercise of the sensory system in the first place and its moulding into sociality during the whole process of development and maturation. What I think is going on is something like this. All these highly organised, highly interconnected pathways of neural tissue form into networks which are then trained by the data flowing through them so that they become pathways of interpretation. All this data is patterned and as more and more patterned data flows through the networks they develop form around the information. The different pathways and splittings-off of this patterned data carry out particular processing transforms on the data, all the time preserving the relational consistency of the pattern.
Data flows through various processing elements.
In the visual system data is split off into colour information pathways, brightness and contrast information, edge orientation and depth detection pathways, and motion detection pathways using both positional and temporal differentiation. The resulting patterns having been analysed for these data are then sent to higher interpretive processing and image recognition. Somewhere along the way they are integrated with auditory and other sense data and the unitary conscious knowing of the world and ourselves ensues. We are talking about highly complexly organised systems in continuous flux which show a centripetally organised structure feeding into itself almost as an oscillatory system which by its own activity may be said to go 'live'. Indivduality is a function of our language and the framework of our culture and its in-forming of ourselves.