"It seems astounding to me that the idea of correspondence between brain activity and ambient features has ever been taken seriously. To see a neuron as being responsible for a percept ... is straight vitalism or animism: It attributes to one component of a system all of the properties of a description..."

"...If a car undergoes a structural change because of bumping into a tree (the fender is twisted and the front tire scratched), we do not say that it remembers the accident by storing a memory, nor do we say that it learned from the event by changing its behavior via a representation of trees. These descriptions seem ludicrous because the car is so obviously a man-made artifact. Yet it seems that the same sort of mechanistic and operational description can be applied to highly plastic autonomous systems like the nervous system. Memory requires no record or storage, for it stands only for a history of structural coupling; learning requires no representation, for it stands for structural plasticity. Whatever the observer wants to see or needs to use in symbolic descriptions, such as storage, and representation as mapping, are not operational."

Francisco J. Varela
Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979)

#FranciscoJVarela #Memory #SymbolicRepresentation #biology #cognition #Cybernetics #philosophy @philosophy

P. 259

'Nowhere, it seems, is the philosophy of control more predominant than in the study of the nervous system. In fact, almost every researcher in neuroscience will take as a dogma that (1) the nervous system acts by picking up "information" from the environment and "processing" it, and that (2) this "processing" is adequate because there is "representation of the outside world in the animal's (or human being's) mind. The brain is a machine to produce an accurate picture of the world. Nowhere have the notions developed in the domain of design have taken deeper root than in this field; the brain as a computer is, by now, a commonsense notion.

Vis-à-vis this predominant opinion, it might seem arrogant to propose a viewpoint that is almost the opposite, namely, that the nervous system operates as a closed network with no inputs or outputs, that its cognitive operation reflects only its organization, and that information is imposed on the environment and not picked up from it.'

"Principles of Biological Autonomy" (1979)
Francisco J Varela

#Biology #Philosophy @philosophy #FranciscoJVarela #Cybernetics #Mind

"Principles of Biological Autonomy" (1979)

Francisco J. Varela

This turned up in the mail. I've only ever had access to a pdf of the introduction. so squeee.

#book #FranciscoJVarela #Biology #Cybernetics #Mathematics #Complexity