This is from a paper exploring the quasi philosophical questions of whether we should think of neuronal rates or phases as “coding”, at all.
Probably not, but I see why the philosophical question is, in fact, welcome.
What’s at stake for us, students of brains and wannabe modellers, is how we may get inspired in finding the pertinent questions, to get to insightful answers.
So I don’t see the true nature of the debate as ‘are brains representing such and such’? Rather, as an evaluation of the benefits of recentering our view on real (and sometimes initial) purposes of nerve cells.
We too often take the view that processing of sensory stimulus shall ultimately lead to a representation allowing us to “make sense of the world”… and we refine models so that they encode things we understand, and hopefully show stepping stones to those representations, imbuing the world with “meaning”. While, as P. Cisek would put it, what they do is often more ‘pragmatic’ than that. What sensory neurons activation was meant to carry originally was often the control of a quite straightforward behaviour.
Which spawns 2 thoughts:
- A pragmatic representation is not necessarily readily amenable to understanding. As the author of the ‘Avida’ alife software said somewhere, optimized representations (such as the ones found by evo search, increasing a behaviour’s fitness) are as cryptic as compressed files… if they were not, ie if they were understandable, they wouldn’t be optimum.
- Although… we “do” make sense of the world. And there shall exist something we could relate to somewhere. And some recognizable ‘encodings’ at times. Such as face cells and the like. But they’re likely high in the hierarchy or emerge from the concurrent activation of lots of more basic loops, having found some new purpose together, and possibly after having reached some critical “mass” (or we easily forget we’re so chauvinistic about human big brains and intelligence or consciousness at times).
That being said, those are my takes only. And I don’t understand in the slightest how plastic nets with STDP cells would finally decide to wire “usefully”, be it to specific motor nerve cells or to drive seemingly hard-fixed purpose neurons such as grid or orientation cells… But I guess some of you people are quite knowledgeable on these questions.