RE: [-empyre-] Accidents (was for example)

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Sorry to keep intervening here... -

On Thu, 6 Nov 2003, Jim Andrews wrote:

> For all our knowledge, we still don't understand even the basics about how
> information is encoded, stored, retrieved, and processed by the brain. We
> ourselves are the most magnificent information processing entities we know
> of.
>
Then how are you sure that it's algorithmic?

> It seems like there's a lot of stuff kicking around in the noodle. Does the
> brain encode our experience? Does it file away our experience in memory in
> an orderly fashion so that our memories of roses, say, can be distinguished
> from our memories of email? So it seems. The brain must have its own way of
> converting sensory input to information that is coded in quite particular
> ways, musn't it?
>
The coding of vision is somewhat understood at this point, from David Marr
on, of course. But perhaps 'coding' or 'encoding' is the wrong word - this
is where Sartre's psychology of imagination comes in -

What may occur is a reconstruction; it's not clear at all that this is
either rule-governed or algorithmic.

The coding need not be 'in quite particular ways' I'd think - it's
wetware, not hardware or software. The coding itself might be mobile,
continuously transforming, no matter how far back one goes in meta-levels.
Certainly if the coding was in the slight way simplistic (as for example
in a Turing machine) it would have been disovered a long time ago.

Alan