common_law comments on Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015 - LessWrong

5 Post author: elharo 02 December 2015 11:28AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (75)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: common_law 12 December 2015 04:57:58AM 3 points [-]

Looking for mental information in individual neuronal firing patterns is looking at the wrong level of scale and at the wrong kind of physical manifestation. As in other statistical dynamical regularities, there are a vast number of microstates (i.e., network activity patterns) that can constitute the same ghloal attractor, and a vast numbmer of trajectories of microstate-to-microstate changes that will tend to converge to a common attractor. But it is the final quasi-regular network-level dynamic, like a melody played by a million-instrument orchestra, that is the medium of mental information. - Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, pp. 516 - 517.