The double look on complex dimension
None of the bettors could win Christof Koch got screwed. The neuroscientist bet in 1998 with the philosopher David Chalmers that neurosciences will be able to detect, in the next 25 years, a specific signature of consciousness in the brain, that is to say a measure of activity which makes it possible to distinguish between … Read more
Presentation The phenomenon that we are sure exists, to experience it directly, is awakened consciousness. The impression as its contents are finely correlated to the activity of the brain. Let’s start by understanding how this incredibly complex web of neurons can generate mental representations, with Stratium, hierarchical theory of mind. Let us then tackle the … Read more
Abstract: The placebo astonishes by working even in those informed that it has no biological effect. Jane Risen, a researcher from Chicago, explains it by taking Daniel Kahneman’s 2-system model of thought: the rational system 2 detects the superstitious error of the intuitive system 1 but does not correct it. This produces acquiescence, a wobbly … Read more
Abstract: The scientist, equipped only with an ontological method, is not prepared for the teleological battlefield. To face it he must choose a philosophical method. Example with the paradox of gender equality. The Monastery of Science Science is a methodology. Not a policy, not a philosophy, not even a power in itself. Its power only … Read more
Abstract: An activated synaptic configuration, as meaning, is a given distribution of probabilities among all its possible meaningful states. It thus emancipates itself from its constitution and represents a qualitative leap. New mental experience. The mind is constructed from these tiers of meanings, a vertical complexity that makes up its intelligence. To begin this definition, … Read more
The Brain-Elmer Since the beginnings of neurology, the brain has been seen as a patchwork of specialized functional centers. Language, vision, motor skills, memory, etc., the neural lesions targeted in a center exclusively cause the alteration of its specific function. The clinical examples are innumerable. Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasias, for example, gave their name to … Read more
Invading neurons No doubt you have noticed like me this growing undesirable effect of the popularity of neuroscience: it frequently replaces the classical paradigms of psychology by their opposites, without real experimental demonstration, as if reading functional MRIs taught us the springs of the human personality… Examples flood our journals that have become neuro-psychological. The … Read more
Natural/artificial neurons in tandem Neuroscientists are currently very busy refining neural/mental correlations. They are helped in this by analogies with artificial neural networks, especially SSL Self-Supervised Learning. It is very easy today to record the activity of hundreds of thousands of natural neurons in response to images or spoken stories. Activation sequences are obtained. If … Read more
Behaviorist crisis “The new theory of the unconscious, it is it who commands!” says Anne Debroise in Science & Vie, after reading Andrew Budson, a neurologist in Boston, but without having understood him well. I no longer know whether to rejoice or be sorry for this litany of articles aimed at de-pedestalizing our unfortunate consciousness. … Read more
Abstract: Neurocognitive Mechanisms (2020), by Gualtiero Piccinini, is a philosophical and neuroscientific work, seeking to ground cognition and its phenomena in a comprehensive neurocomputational theory. But the philosophical treatment is wrong. The introduction of “aspects” of a single level of reality also introduces something that looks independently of that single level. We fall back on … Read more