"Like trees similar in their gross physical profile, brains can be similar in their gross functional profiles while being highly idiosyncratic in the myriad details of their fine-grained arborization."
— Churchland, Paul (b. 1942)
Author
Place of Publication
Cambridge
Publisher
MIT Press
Date
1989
Metaphor
"Like trees similar in their gross physical profile, brains can be similar in their gross functional profiles while being highly idiosyncratic in the myriad details of their fine-grained arborization."
Metaphor in Context
While the weights are of essential importance for understanding long-term learning nad fundamental conceptual change, the partitions across the activation space, and the prototypical hot-spots they harbor, are much more useful in reckoning the cognitivie and behavioral similarities across individuals in the short term. People react to the world in similar ways not because their underlying weight configurations are closely similar on a synapse-by-synapse comparison, but because their activation spaces are similarly partitioned. Like trees similar in their gross physical profile, brains can be similar in their gross functional profiles while being highly idiosyncratic in the myriad details of their fine-grained arborization (compare Quine 1960, p. 8).
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Categories
Provenance
Reading Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave, 2007)
Citation
Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). Citing fourth printing of 2000.
Date of Entry
04/10/2013
