Fwd: representation and consciousness

Dave
I appreciate your effort to advance the cogai field, and also apologise for
not making the calls
I remain very interested in learning about your progress, keep us posted
Here is interesting video which seems relevant to what you are doing as
shared on the ai kr cg list
Please let us have any comments you may have (on what Brette says in
relation to what you are doing/proposing to do)

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 10:03 AM
Subject: representation and consciousness
To: W3C AIKR CG <public-aikr@w3.org>


This is an interesting talk relevant to this  CG as  cognitionm AI KR and
Neuroscience are converging
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAmB5SOS2LQ

Neural representation is a key neuroscientific concept meant to bridge
brain and mind, or brain and behavior. But what is meant exactly by a
“neural representation”? Conventionally, a neural representation is a
correspondence between something in the brain and something in the world, a
“code”. The encoding view of representations faces two critical issues,
empirical and theoretical. Empirically, I will show that neural codes do
not have the properties required to naturalize mental representations.
Theoretically, it raises the problem of “system-detectable error”
(Bickhard): if the brain sits at the receiving end of the code, then how
can it know if the representation is wrong? As John Eccles has concluded,
the logical implication is dualism – there must be a “decoder” that
translates brain properties to world properties. Consequently, a number of
authors have argued that representations are not only homuncular but also
unnecessary: adapted behavior results not from calculations on an internal
copy of the world, but from coupling between body and world – “the world is
its own best model” (Brooks). Anti-representationalism introduces crucial
concepts missing from the conventional view (embodiment, autonomy,
dynamicism) but it struggles to explain some aspects of anticipation and
abstraction. I argue that the problem with representation is to think of it
as a “thing” that can be manipulated and observed (like a painting), which
collides with the dynamical nature of brain activity. I suggest to shift
the focus from the encoding properties of brain states, a dualistic
concept, to the representational properties of brain (and body) processes,
such as anticipation and abstraction.