Causality and Modern Science

Bunge, Mario

doi:10.4324/9781315081656

Cited by 121 publications

(118 citation statements)

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“…The problem remained largely unaddressed for over two millennia but became prominent in philosophical discourse in the XVIII—XIX centuries (Hume, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Descartes, et al). However, it was not until the middle of the last century that the scope of discourse was radically expanded; largely in response to challenges faced in scientific enquiry, where rapidly accumulating data resisted traditional modes of understanding and explanation (e.g., Bunge, 1979; Cushing, 1994; Sloman, 2005). Philosophy was joined by psychology and cognitive science and, more recently, by what could be defined as physics of the mind— an emergent discipline combining statistical physics, information theory and neuroscience to elucidate neuronal underpinnings of cognition (Penrose, 1989, 1994, 1997; Friston et al, 2006; Friston, 2010, 2013).…”

Section: Theories Of Understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life and Understanding: The Origins of “Understanding” in Self-Organizing Nervous Systems

Yufik¹,

Friston

2016

Front. Syst. Neurosci.

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This article is motivated by a formulation of biotic self-organization in Friston (2013), where the emergence of “life” in coupled material entities (e.g., macromolecules) was predicated on bounded subsets that maintain a degree of statistical independence from the rest of the network. Boundary elements in such systems constitute a Markov blanket; separating the internal states of a system from its surrounding states. In this article, we ask whether Markov blankets operate in the nervous system and underlie the development of intelligence, enabling a progression from the ability to sense the environment to the ability to understand it. Markov blankets have been previously hypothesized to form in neuronal networks as a result of phase transitions that cause network subsets to fold into bounded assemblies, or packets (Yufik and Sheridan, 1997; Yufik, 1998a). The ensuing neuronal packets hypothesis builds on the notion of neuronal assemblies (Hebb, 1949, 1980), treating such assemblies as flexible but stable biophysical structures capable of withstanding entropic erosion. In other words, structures that maintain their integrity under changing conditions. In this treatment, neuronal packets give rise to perception of “objects”; i.e., quasi-stable (stimulus bound) feature groupings that are conserved over multiple presentations (e.g., the experience of perceiving “apple” can be interrupted and resumed many times). Monitoring the variations in such groups enables the apprehension of behavior; i.e., attributing to objects the ability to undergo changes without loss of self-identity. Ultimately, “understanding” involves self-directed composition and manipulation of the ensuing “mental models” that are constituted by neuronal packets, whose dynamics capture relationships among objects: that is, dependencies in the behavior of objects under varying conditions. For example, movement is known to involve rotation of population vectors in the motor cortex (Georgopoulos et al., 1988, 1993). The neuronal packet hypothesis associates “understanding” with the ability to detect and generate coordinated rotation of population vectors—in neuronal packets—in associative cortex and other regions in the brain. The ability to coordinate vector representations in this way is assumed to have developed in conjunction with the ability to postpone overt motor expression of implicit movement, thus creating a mechanism for prediction and behavioral optimization via mental modeling that is unique to higher species. This article advances the notion that Markov blankets—necessary for the emergence of life—have been subsequently exploited by evolution and thus ground the ways that living organisms adapt to their environment, culminating in their ability to understand it.

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Section: Theories Of Understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life and Understanding: The Origins of “Understanding” in Self-Organizing Nervous Systems

Yufik¹,

Friston

2016

Front. Syst. Neurosci.

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“…The majority of well-known principles can apparently be included in the more general principle of causality, which combines phenomena or variations in the state of the system with the conditions that generate this phenomenon [19].…”

Section: Degeneration With Respect To Small Parameters and Coordinatementioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling of Wave Propagation in Degenerate Hyperbolic Systems

Селезов

Kryvonos

2015

Cybern Syst Anal

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Degeneration in a small spatial coordinate of the original initial-boundary-value problem for hyperbolic equations is considered in order to construct simpler models. The problem is investigated in a domain whose one spatial scale is much less than the other scales. This makes it possible to expand the desired functions in power series and hence to reduce the dimension of the problem. However, this comes at the cost of degeneration of the spectrum of the original three-dimensional problem.

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“…One way to explain the necessity of applying the concepts of human life to produce successful design outcomes is to open up the basic metascientifi c diff erence between the logics of the causal natural sciences and intentional human research (Bunge 1959 ;Radnitsky 1968 ;Stegmüller 1969 ;von Wright 1971 ). In causal explanations, the phenomenon that should be explained (i.e., the explanandum) follows the phenomenon that explains (the explanans), but in intentional or teleological explanations, something that happens after the event explains the explanandum (von Wright 1971 ).…”

Section: Towards a New Interaction Design Culturementioning

confidence: 99%