paul churchland - engine of reason - seat of soul

[...]... own tiny part of the overall transformation of the activation -pattern -at-the -LGN into the activation -pattern -at-the -visual -cortex If the LGN is thought of as a starting gate, the race to the visual cortex is over in about 10 milliseconds (msec), with all of the axonal impulses crossing the cortical finish line together This time scale- l0 msec- is typical for a single layer -to -layer transformation... population of neurons , also composed of three cell types These downstream cells embody our true color space, a space with three dimensions this time , one for each of the three cell types One axis of the brain ' s color space represents the result of a tug -of- war between two of the cone types back at the retina : it is called the Blue -versus-Green axis A second axis , representing the result of a different... conal tug -of- war , is called the Yellow -versus-Blue axis And the third axis represents the local relative brightness levels falling across all three retinal cone types Any humanly perceivable color , therefore , will be a distinct pattern SensoryRepresentation IS Orange Vector ! ! i ' " ) ( - - ~>d Pink Vector c m c 0 0 0 0 Orang m - -Gre ~> d Dark Vec ".' - ~~jO e."0 .-' "Q0 ' e~ ' Oft " ((ce... this large advantage both vivid and visual , think of things in the following way To get a TV display large enough to compete with the representational power of a single human brain , we would have to tile the entire outside surface of one of the twin World Trade Towers in New York City - all 500,000 square feet of it - with fully one-half million 17-inch TV screens, all glued cheek to cheek and facing... Representtion : The Incredible Power of Vector Coding Humans are famously bad at describing their sensations- of tastes, of aromas, of feelings - but we are famously good at discriminating , enjoying , and suffering them Indeed , becoming familiar with the great space of sensory characters is part of what makes a life worth living And yet , while we all participate in the richness of sensory life , we struggle... seems, we can The other virtues of vector coding are also present here Members of the same family will tend to be coded in the same general region of face space, a consequence of - or better , the ground of - their facial similarities As well , children will often be coded at some point that is roughly between the two coding points for their parents " " , a consequence of their splitting the difference... 100th of a second- because it performs the many computations required independently and all at the same time Kitchen lore contains a humble analog of this timesaving trick Faced with the problem of cutting the stem ends off each and every one of a large bag of green beans before tossing them into the pot , the wise cook lines them all up in parallel , stem ends together , and lops them all off with... TV screen The yard -square patch of pixels on the right -most window at the 103rd floor , for example , has no way to talk to or influence the behavior of the large patch of pixels on the left -most window at the 57th There are no causal interactions whatever between the parts of this system To introduce such causal interaction , we would need to add , for example , a massive cable of optical fibers... pattern of activations across the four types of receptors , as will a spoonful of mustard or a pinch of sauerkraut W.e can see how familiar tastes cluster and diverge by representing them graphically in a " taste space" , a space with a proprietary dimension for each of the four cell types on the tongue (figure 2.2) ' (I here suppress one of the four axes, since 1 can t draw a 4-D space on a 2-D surface... our current self-conception: our shared portrait of ourselves as self-conscious creatures with beliefs, desires emotions , , and the power of reason This conceptual framework is the unquestioned possessionof ' every normal human who wasn t raised from birth by wolves It is the template of our normal socialization as children ; it is the primary vehicle of our social and psychological commerceas adults; . own tiny part of the overall transformation of the activation - pattern - at - the - LGN into the activation - pattern - at - the - visual - cortex. If the LGN is thought of as a starting. the entire outside surface of one of the twin World Trade Towers in New York City - all 500 , 000 square feet of it - with fully one - half million 17 - inch TV screens , all glued. as monitoring or " watching " - strictly , the process of re - representing the activation patterns of earlier populations of neurons - is not a passive process at all . It