Hijacking your post with a dubious segue because I’m itching to bounce these thoughts off somebody:
I’ve been consuming a lot of talks / writing recently about “enactive” pictures of how our brains function. From what I gather, recent studies have called into question the entire idea of real world concepts being “represented” by an area of the brain at all. While it’s true that atandard fMRI-style snapshots of brain activity are semi-stable over the course of a short experiment, it’s not true over longer timeframes. The response to the same stimulus will change over time. They refer to this as “representational drift” in the literature, and some people are using this to bolster theories of mind that they consider non-representational. They instead emphasize the brain as a kind of dynamical system that learns to “resonate” with the world to pull itself back into homeostasis. The focus shifts away from facts and memories as data, and sees neuronal plasticity more as a mechanism for tuning the brain’s resonant frequencies. This obviously places high importance on the spiking, recurrent nature of actual neurons, as opposed to the neurons-as-functions / back-propagation / ML approach.
My mind’s not made up on how interesting and revolutionary this approach is / isn’t. The distinction seems to be about whether learning is more like “writing to disk” or “tuning a PID controller” - but in either case, the world is leaving a stateful imprint on your brain that will impact how it processes future data. Is that important to understanding how brains work, or is it just semantics?
I’ve been consuming a lot of talks / writing recently about “enactive” pictures of how our brains function. From what I gather, recent studies have called into question the entire idea of real world concepts being “represented” by an area of the brain at all. While it’s true that atandard fMRI-style snapshots of brain activity are semi-stable over the course of a short experiment, it’s not true over longer timeframes. The response to the same stimulus will change over time. They refer to this as “representational drift” in the literature, and some people are using this to bolster theories of mind that they consider non-representational. They instead emphasize the brain as a kind of dynamical system that learns to “resonate” with the world to pull itself back into homeostasis. The focus shifts away from facts and memories as data, and sees neuronal plasticity more as a mechanism for tuning the brain’s resonant frequencies. This obviously places high importance on the spiking, recurrent nature of actual neurons, as opposed to the neurons-as-functions / back-propagation / ML approach.
My mind’s not made up on how interesting and revolutionary this approach is / isn’t. The distinction seems to be about whether learning is more like “writing to disk” or “tuning a PID controller” - but in either case, the world is leaving a stateful imprint on your brain that will impact how it processes future data. Is that important to understanding how brains work, or is it just semantics?