To perceive means... to find order over patterns; these orderings are what we call objects. ...[I]t amounts to ...identification of these objects by … - Joscha Bach

Attempts in psychology at overarching theories of the mind have been all but shattered by the influence of behaviorism, and where cognitive psychology has sprung up in its tracks, it rarely acknowledges that there is something as "intelligence per se", as opposed to the individual performance of a group of subjects in an isolated set of experiments.

[T]o encode a brain genetically, based on the hardware that we are using, we need something like at least 500 kilobytes of code... actually... it's going to be a little more, I guess. It sounds like surprisingly little... but in terms of scientific theories this is a lot. ...The universe, according to the core theory of quantum mechanics... it's like half a page of code... to generate the universe. ...[I]f you want to understand evolution, it's like a paragraph... a couple lines, really, to understand an evolutionary process. ...[T]here's lots ...of details that you get afterwards, because this process itself doesn't define what all the animals are going to look like. In a similar way, the code of the universe doesn't tell you what this planet is going to look like and you... are going to look like. It's just defining the rule book.

If we want to understand music we have to go beyond understanding sound. We have to understand the transformations that sound can have if you play a different pitch. We have to arrange the sound in a sequencer that gives you rhythms, and so on, and then we want to identify some kind of musical grammar that we can use to... control the sequencer. So we have stacked structures that simulate the world. ...If you want to model a world of music you need to have the lowest level of the precepts, then the higher levels of mental simulations, which give the sequences... and the grammars of music... [B]eyond this you have the conceptual landscape that you can use to describe the different styles of music. ...[I]f you go up in the hierarchy, you get to more and more abstract models, more and more conceptual models, and more and more analytic models. ...[T]hese are causal models...