Followup to: Balance of context.
In his book “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies”, Douglas Hofstadter, among other things, explored the notion of conceptual slippage, as a mechanism of fluid cognition. Conceptual slippage is a “context-induced dislodging of one concept by a closely related one, inside a mental representation of some situation”. It can be caught in action in slips of the tongue, when related words or phrases competing for expression of the same context get morphed together, resulting in combinations such as “I’ll chake a look” (“I’ll check is out” vs. “I’ll take a look”) or “I’m going to the begin — uhh, the entrance of the store”. Conceptual slippages perform steps of local search, gradually driving mental representation in a more balanced state.
When global context shifts, it changes the dynamic of structure waves. Some structural contexts get reconstructed in a slightly different way, and since different structural contexts match different patterns, the effects gets magnified along the path of structure waves. As a result, some new patterns get reconstructed, and some old patterns get forgotten. New patterns come with associations of their own, initiating restoration of whole new structures. The moment when a noticeably different pattern gets introduced in the scene corresponds best to the concept of conceptual slippage. It’s a change in representation that lies at the boundary between tiny changes, and a wave of integration of completely new structure.
Conceptual slippages can be used to describe the process of context balancing. Like patterns, they are a tool for describing the dynamic. They are above insignificant changes in structure waves, but still small enough to have structure of their own, to capture replacement of one pattern by another similar pattern. If global context is changed slowly enough, even significant reconfiguration of representation can be regarded as a sequence of conceptual slippages. As I’ll describe later, good representation learns to perform anticipated shifts of balance in as few conceptual slippages as possible, even if the change appears too big and distributed at first.
