Intentional Neurodynamic Systems
Can we --
•Understand Them?
•Build Them?
•Become One?
Paul J. Werbos, pwerbos@ieee.org, not representing
anyone’s official views, least of all my employer’s…
This being a informal “off the record”  workshop,  the most important discussions were mainly off of the formal record. I will make a few comments which try to capture some of that discussion.
I apologize that I will not be able to do them full justice, and I  warn that these will be personal informal remarks; no one should expect them to bias my treatment of other  views when I wear a more institutional  hat.

In this workshop, everyone is interested in trying to understand  how the human brain (and other brains)  works as a kind of nonlinear dynamical system. We all understand that human brains are very complex systems, and that complex systems can demonstrate all  kinds of emergent behavior, such as fixed point equilibria, wildly uncorrelated “heat death” behavior, low-dimensional chaotic attractors, attractors of high dimensionality but dimensionality much lower than “heat death” (like turbulence or Per Pak’s kind of complexity), phase transitions, pattern generation, white noise, etc.

But in the end, these metaphors have limited information content. They tell us that we should think of the brain as a kind of field of variables extended in spaced and time, governed by differential or finite-difference equations or a hybrid of the two. But the space of possible dynamical systems of that sort  is infinite. In fact, it is a “big infinity.” To model the brain, how in the world do we find the “needle in the haystack,” the limited kinds of system or model that the brain might plausibly belong to?

The key idea here is that we really need to exploit the fact that the brain belongs to that tiny subset of dynamical systems which may be called “intentional systems,” systems which strongly exhibit such characteristics as goals or  values. The evolution of brains has been dominated by  nature’s “efforts” to “design” a system around effective, functional ability to compute something. But to compute what?