Re: Some closing comments.

From: Allan L Combs <[email protected]>
Date: Wed 01 Jul 1998 - 21:47:39 CEST

Dear FIS colleagues:

Thanks Roberto for the excellent summary that puts things in a nicely
ordered perspective. I whish I could have had more time to participate
personally.

> The issue of consciousness could be studied not only from the standpoint
> of humans, but that of animal behavior as well, as Morris proposes. Allan
> Combs idea of the brain as a system at the boundary between
> information-driven dynamics and energetically-driven dynamics is
> intriguing. A broad notion of computation that includes as such the action
> of physical processes, would consider both one and the same, although
> would allow for both to coexist, for example, in artificial "brains".
> Would they coexist also in the human brain, or a biological brain? I
> really do not know.

For interest's sake let me note that there is a small but growing movement
in the US to replace computational theories of the mind ("cognitive"
theories and approaches) with dynamical ones. Work by people like Walter
Freeman represents the same shift in terms of the brain. If this trend
continues and in the next generation of scientists actually overtakes the
traditional cognitive approaches to the brain and the mind, then the way
will be open to also replace informational dynamics of the old
computational variety with models of an energy-driven form. The current
success of neural networks approaches seems to lie somewhere in between.

Allan Combs
Received on Wed Jul 1 21:49:19 1998

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