Archive for April, 2008

Abstraction and concreteness, complexity and simplicity

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

In a now classic article from 1977, Sverker Runeson observed that variables which we scientists consider to be basic, such as length, duration, etc, may or may not be basic from the point of view of opportunistic, evolved perceptual systems.  He suggests that perception may consist of "smart mechanism" which ...

Degrees of variation

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Take any two human brains and compare them. Their coarse structure will be similar: here a gyrus, there the thalamus. The correspondence is pretty good as you look closer and closer, until you get down to a certain scale. The exact scale probably depends on the local ...

What the brain is for

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Allow me a small moment of hubris. We have been fundamentally wrong about what kind of thing the brain is. We have worked with the notion that it was some kind of a controller. This produces the embarrassing question of who is doing the controlling. No. Brains bring forth ...