display all the ideas for this combination of texts
7 ideas
4928 | Brain complexity balances segregation and integration, like a good team of specialists [Edelman/Tononi] |
Full Idea: A theoretical analysis of complexity suggests that neuronal complexity strikes an optimum balance between segregation and integration, which fits the view of the brain as a collection of specialists who talk to each other a lot. | |
From: G Edelman / G Tononi (Consciousness: matter becomes imagination [2000], Ch.11) | |
A reaction: This is a theoretical point, but comes from a leading neuroscientist, and seems to endorse Fodor's modularity proposal. For a philosopher, one of the issues here is how to reconcile the segregation with the Cartesian unity and personal identity of a mind. |
4927 | Information-processing views of the brain assume the existence of 'information', and dubious brain codes [Edelman/Tononi] |
Full Idea: So-called information-processing views of the brain have been criticized because they typically assume the existence in the world of previously defined information, and often assume the existence of precise neural codes for which there is no evidence. | |
From: G Edelman / G Tononi (Consciousness: matter becomes imagination [2000], Ch.11) | |
A reaction: Fodor is the target here. Searle is keen that 'intrinsic intentionality' is required to see something as 'information'. It is hard to see how anything acquires significance as it flows through a mechanical process. |
4922 | Consciousness involves interaction with persons and the world, as well as brain functions [Edelman/Tononi] |
Full Idea: We emphatically do not identify consciousness in its full range as arising solely in the brain, since we believe that higher brain functions require interactions both with the world and with other persons. | |
From: G Edelman / G Tononi (Consciousness: matter becomes imagination [2000], Pref) | |
A reaction: Would you gradually lose higher brain functions if you lived entirely alone? Intriguingly, this sounds like a neuroscientist asserting the necessity for broad content in order to understand the brain. |
5793 | Concepts and generalisations result from brain 'global mapping' by 'reentry' [Edelman/Tononi, by Searle] |
Full Idea: When you get maps all over the brain signalling to each other by reentry you have what Edelman calls 'global mapping', and this allows the system not only to have perceptual categories and generalisation, but also to coordinate perception and action. | |
From: report of G Edelman / G Tononi (Consciousness: matter becomes imagination [2000]) by John Searle - The Mystery of Consciousness Ch.3 | |
A reaction: This is the nearest we have got to a proper scientific account of thought (as opposed to untested speculation about Turing machines). Something like this account must be right. A concept is a sustained process, not a static item. |
4926 | Concepts arise when the brain maps its own activities [Edelman/Tononi] |
Full Idea: We propose that concepts arise from the mapping by the brain itself of the activity of the brain's own areas and regions. | |
From: G Edelman / G Tononi (Consciousness: matter becomes imagination [2000], Ch. 9) | |
A reaction: Yes. One should add that the brain appears to be physically constructed with the logic of a filing system, which would mean that our concepts were labels for files within the system. Nature generates some of the files, and thinking creates the others. |
2601 | Qualia must be innate, because physical motions do not contain them [Descartes] |
Full Idea: The ideas of pains, colours, sounds etc. must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions. | |
From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365) | |
A reaction: Simple and brilliant! We know perfectly well that there is no redness zooming through the air from a tomato (or the air would be pink!). Redness occurs when the light arrives, so we add the redness, so it is innate. |
2600 | The mind's innate ideas are part of its capacity for thought [Descartes] |
Full Idea: I have never written or taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking. | |
From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365) |