Structure and dynamics of working language, Spivak
“In each case the hylomorph came to exist by way of some sort of natural push or process urging the formation of smaller, more concentrated symbols to instantiate pattern as matter or bind matter to pattern.
We are not interested in these examples per se, but rather in the fact that there appears to be a natural process by which hylomorphs are continually being formed and condensed, and the fact that this process seems to work at all scales and regardless of substrate.“
Ologs: A Categorical Framework for Knowledge Representation, David Spivak, Robert Kent
From the Tsuchiya Lab
A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness, O’Regan & Noe
“there is no a priori reason why similar neural processes should generate similar percepts.”
“what does differentiate vision from, say, audition or touch, is the structure of the rules governing the sensory changes produced by various motor actions, that is, what we call the sensorimotor contingencies governing visual exploration. Because the sensorimotor contingencies within different sensory domains (vision, audition, smell, etc.) are subject to different (in)variance properties, the structure of the rules that govern perception in these different modalities will be different in each modality.”
““Red” is knowing the structure of the changes that “red” causes: Under the present view of what seeing is, the visual experience of a red color patch depends on the structure of the changes in sensory input that occur when you move your eyes around relative to the patch, or when you move the patch around relative to yourself.”
Lee and Kleiner’s talks in Mathematical Spaces for Conscious Experiences at ASSC26
Neuroscience
A new no-report paradigm reveals that face cells encode both consciously perceived and suppressed stimuli
Hesse & Tsao
For a more accessible summary of the Tsao Lab’s work—Doris published How the Brain Reads Faces in Scientific American
Thalamic control of sensory selection in divided attention evidence for the directed attention (in mice) working through suppressing irrelevant stimuli (rather than amplifying relevant stimuli)
The non-specific matrix thalamus facilitates the cortical information processing modes relevant for conscious awareness
Cellular Mechanisms of Conscious Processing
Active cortical dendrites modulate perception
Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience 10: Mac Shine on thalamo-cortical circuits, A presentation summing up Mac Shine and Eli Muller’s work on the thalamus
Etc
A Networked World (Part 1) → Part 3, David Spivak guest post on Azimuth