@NicoleCRust @knutson_brain

Here's the beginning of a prospective blog series I started … this topic interacts strongly with a host of others I've been struggling to articulate over the years …

Inquiry Into Inquiry • Discussion 6
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/04/30/inquiry-into-inquiry-discussion-6/

Re: Nicole Rust
• https://mathstodon.xyz/@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social/110197230713039748

❝Computations or Processes —
How do you think about the building blocks of the brain?❞

I keep coming back to this thread about levels, along with others on the related issue of paradigms, as those have long been major questions for me. I am trying to clarify my current understanding for a blog post. It will start out a bit like this —

A certain amount of “level” language is natural in the sciences but “level” metaphors come with hidden assumptions about higher and lower places in hierarchies which don't always fit the case at hand. In complex cases what look at first like parallel strata may in time be better comprehended as intersecting domains or mutually recursive and entangled orders of being. When that happens we can guard against misleading imagery by speaking of domains or realms instead of levels.

To be continued …

#Peirce #Logic #LogicalGraphs #DifferentialLogic #CactusLanguage
#Inquiry #InquiryDrivenSystem #InquiryIntoInquiry #NeuralNetwork
#Semiotics #RelationTheory #SignRelation #TriadicRelation #Model
#ObjectiveReality #MathematicalStructure #SymbolicRepresentation

Inquiry Into Inquiry • Discussion 6
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/04/30/inquiry-into-inquiry-discussion-6/

Re: Nicole Rust
• https://mathstodon.xyz/@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social/110197230713039748

❝Computations or Processes — How do you think about the building blocks of the brain?❞

I keep coming back to this thread about levels, along with others on the related issue of paradigms, as those have long been major questions for me. I am trying to clarify my current understanding for a blog post. It will start out a bit like this —

A certain amount of “level” language is natural in the sciences but “level” metaphors come with hidden assumptions about higher and lower places in hierarchies which don't always fit the case at hand. In complex cases what look at first like parallel strata may in time be better comprehended as intersecting domains or mutually recursive and entangled orders of being. When that happens we can guard against misleading imagery by speaking of domains or realms instead of levels.

To be continued …

#Peirce #Logic #LogicalGraphs #DifferentialLogic #CactusLanguage
#Inquiry #InquiryDrivenSystem #InquiryIntoInquiry #NeuralNetwork
#Semiotics #RelationTheory #SignRelation #TriadicRelation #Model
#ObjectiveReality #MathematicalStructure #SymbolicRepresentation

It's important not to insult your audience. Assume they know their craft well but you have something to offer. You need to show them how your world intersects with theirs in a way they understand. It needs to be emotional and relevant to them, otherwise they won't care. And once you have the connection and they understand you, then you can use the shortcut technical term. Everytime you say it the audience should recall the structure and nature of the thing. #SymbolicRepresentation

"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

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