In his last Post Jorge proposed the sequence: landscape situation, aesthesis (perception), encounter, experience…appreciation.  It appears of interest to explore the ways the terms of this sequence may be interconnected. I agree with what is said there that "to depict the process leading to landscape appreciation as a sequence of unidirectional discrete steps" is far from a plausible assumption. However, mutual interconnections through a number of feedback loops, as he proposes, is hardly feasible since to progress in such a model we'd have to introduce mathematical functions (which as yet no one has proposed).

   It may be promising to explore the application of Minsky's frames to the sequence in question. The approach was summarily outlined by Marvin Minsky, (from the MIT-AI Lab.), back in 1975, as:

  "We can think of a frame as a network of nodes and relations. The "top levels" of a frame are fixed, and represent things that are always true about the supposed situation. The lower levels have many terminals–"slots" that must be filled by specific instances or data. Each terminal can specify conditions its assignments must meet. (The assignments themselves are usually smaller "sub-frames.") Simple conditions are specified by markers that might require a terminal assignment to be a person, an object of sufficient value, or a pointer to a sub-frame of a certain type. More complex conditions can specify relations among the things assigned to several terminals."

   Within this approach we could think of each term like 'landscape' situation, encounter, perception, experience, etc. as individual frames with its corresponding terminals-"slots" to be filled by specific instances. Once a given frame is sufficiently elaborated it could be incorporated as a sub-frame of the following term in the sequence, with Landscape Appreciation as the top of the hierarchical arrangement. What makes this approach promising is that Minsky's frames are extremely flexible and plastic; this is quite an advantage given the fuzziness of most of the concepts involved ( as Tittivulus keeps reminding us).

  In a following Post I propose to start, as an illustration, with the first term in the sequence: a landscape situation.