I wanted to start with a statement I agree with. Carrol Cox Aug. 11, 98 " The brain, and particularly memory, as described by Rosenfield seems to have no room for anything that even vaguely and sloppily could be called "structures.""
Doyle I don’t know the Israel Rosenfield text. But that is close to both my view and the current connectionist understanding of brain neural networks as my reading in other areas allows me to grasp these things. My qualifications concerning neurology is that I read a lot and I’m a working class guy. My remarks then aren’t meant to meet the standard of a claim. However, I do think what Carrol Cox points at merits a Marxist discussion here. Here is why I think this.
Doyle We see that mathematical formalisms such symmetry groups sometimes lead us to think that the brain has such structures. As Israel Rosenfield writes such is not currently thought true of the brain by those who believe the connectionist view of the brain, and based upon extensive medical research into the brain. The great linguist Chomsky has used mathematical formalism to great effect in exploring syntactical universalisms of language, and he believes that these formalisms must be "innate" to the brain. This important theoretical position of Chomsky has had a tremendous impact in science by-passing the road blocks thrown up by behaviorism in psychology and which treated the mind as "black box" (an essentially Kantian position). I think of this as a scientific taboo which was breached right after WWII by both linguists, and a nascent computer industry.
Doyle The tendency to think of the brain as having mathematical structure embedded in it, seems to me to reflect a social and ideological drive to attribute "god" like qualities to the mind. In other words, an other worldly or "transcendental" aspect to the mind. To think of the brain as somehow out of this world. This position is dying in our culture in the sense that taboos about the mind are giving way to a freedom to speculate about the mind in a way that for instance Marx himself couldn’t have. I really do not believe Hegel has much to contribute to the understanding of the mind which neural networks give us. But Marx was freed by studying Hegel from a mechanistic outlook toward economics. For that we ought to be grateful.
Doyle Jim Farmelant writes Aug 11, 98: " The question of to what extent a given pattern of behavior is contingency-shaped or rule-governed is an empirical one that can only be settled by an experimental analysis. This view seems IMO consistent with the observations of both Chuck and Doyle."
Doyle No doubt that the material proof is lacking to decisively reject a rule governed brain hypothesis. But the obvious is also true from Carrol Cox’s citation there is no evidence in the brain so far found of extensive "rules" although some "instincts" are present. The idea that such things as mathematics are external to us, and the mind is contingent (or adaptive, and adaptable) has political implications. Primarily in our culture, to create a conflict with the aims that arise in computing to substitute machines for humans. IBM went to a lot of trouble to create a computer to defeat the chess player, Gary Kasparov. And then dropped the issue abruptly after Kasparov was defeated by the machine. Clearly IBM and other corporations want to use machines to move into brain work. To substitute the machine for the General Secretary of the CP as it were. We have to understand this drive in Capitalism and why this conflicts with a democratic view of human existence. I would say this corporatist idea reflects the God’s point of view, that something can know in an absolute sense "truth". As socialist we instead rely upon the totality of human actions to "know" the world. We don’t have a ‘faith’ that a ruler is anything but another one of us.
Chuck Grimes writes: " What I am most interested in is dis-placing or eliminating structure, rules, organization, and other extremely difficult to account for appearant aspects of the biological world. I want to displace all this paraphenalia out into the world and the environment. There is far too much concentration on trying to discover hidden design in biological processes, "
Doyle I believe this is my opinion too. It is our way of freeing ourselves from the kings, and queens that would "rule" us if only we could just find them somewhere in the world. We must rely upon ourselves. Regards, Doyle Saylor