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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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