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I was intrigued by the question of: what does it mean to know something?  It seems that to know something means that, even if the nervous system may not have experienced that something, the I-function has constructed a reality about it.  An idea offered in class by professor Grobstein it that the I-function creates the concept of reality so that it will continually check that reality.  Why does it need to continually check the reality?  (Why create a reality at all?  Why not just live?)  The I-function must be fulfilling some other function by constructing new realities…

I wonder if one function of reworking reality is to learn about and adapt to our changing environment.  Or, perhaps the I-function’s role is important as an inferring mechanism for experiencing those aspects of life that are not picked up through sensory pigments, such as understanding behavior or connecting to other people. 

Since reality is a construct of the mind based on the inputs that the nervous system receives through sensory input, and since it is important for the nervous system to continually be checking that input in case the environment is changing, perhaps these realities are just the I-functions way of keeping track of any input changes with respect to all other inputs to the nervous system.   But why do we have the ability to think about these realities?  

It seems, then, that our ability to access and even change our realities of the world around us and how we interact in it should serve a purpose beyond sensing the world.  We have great power in our ability to change our realities because it means that we can conceive of a world around us irregardless of what the nervous system senses of that world.  Thus, the I-function allows us the ability to try out theories about those parts of the world that we can not actively sense, but can only confer knowledge of through our indirect experience with them.  For example, we are able to make up theories about why other people do what they do by integrating those experiences of them obtained through the senses with those past experiences of interactions with them (based on our I-function’s past realities) saved in memory.  In this way, we can check current input with past input in different situations to see if the way that we are understanding a person’s behavior makes sense.  This seems to be a very good way in which we might use realities and since we are employing those realities to try and understand continually changing situations or entities, it is important to be constantly checking and reworking those realities against new input.