Metadata →
- Tags: cerebro cognición mente representación umwelt
[!summary]Neuroscience studies the relationship between neural representations and mental representations. While patterns of neural activity carry information, not all patterns are considered representations. Simple reflex circuits respond to stimuli without internally representing the information. More complex information processing, like visual perception, requires internal neural representation. The question then arises of when intermediate neural representations give rise to high-level mental representations. The umwelt of an organism, its self-centered map of the environment, determines what it can detect and care about. Perception is an active process of sense-making that results in a filtered, action-oriented landscape of affordances. Different organisms have different cognitive umwelts based on their sensory capabilities, internal processing levels, and cognitive horizons. Only a subset of neural representations become meaningful mental representations, and only a subset of those may be consciously thought about. … [!note]
Artículo explora los conceptos de representaciones neutrales y mentales, y la relación entre ambos. Utiliza el concepto de Umwelt como andamiaje para pensar el funcionamiento del sistema nervioso. Plantea que “the mind is what the brain does” es una expresión poco útil por lo tremendamente ambigua. Hay cosas que el cerebro hace que nunca devienen representaciones mentales.
Highlights
id677187792
It is often said that “the mind is what the brain does.” Modern neuroscience has indeed shown us that mental goings-on rely on and are in some sense entailed by neural goings-on. But the truth is that we have a poor handle on the nature of that relationship
id677193880
We don’t want to think about the photons hitting our retina, even though our neural systems are detecting and processing that information. That’s not the right level of information to link to stored knowledge of the world or to combine with data from other sensory modalities. What we need to think about are the objects in the world that these photons are bouncing off of before they reach our eyeballs. We, as behaving organisms, need to cognitively work with our perceptual inferences, not our sensory data.
id677195073
But the umwelt also crucially entails valence, salience and relevance — it is a self-centered map of things in the environment that the organism can detect and that it cares about. Perception in this view is not the neutral, passive acquisition of information. It is an active process of sense-making, which results in a highly filtered, value-laden, action-oriented landscape of affordances. If an organism is thinking at all, these are the things that it needs to think about.
id677195613
A nematode can’t be thinking about objects far away from it because it has no means to detect them. Its cognitive umwelt is consequently limited to the here and now. A lamprey can’t be thinking about types of objects because it doesn’t have enough levels of processing to abstract the requisite categorical relationships. And a human baby can’t think about next week because its cognitive horizon doesn’t extend that far.
Interesante pensar el Umwelt desde el punto de vista psicoanalítico: algo que no eres capaz de representar porque está fuera de lo que actualmente es significativo y relevante para ti.
id677195905
High-level cognition is useful precisely because it ignores so much low-level detail — because of what’s not on your mind.
id677196730
Thus, only a subset of neural representations — the meaningful elements that are processed by various neural subsystems — rise to the level of mental representations — the elements of cognition. Moreover, only a subset of those mental objects — a varying subset, depending on circumstances — may be things that we need to think about consciously. It’s thus too vague and all-inclusive to simply say, “The mind is what the brain does.” Our mental goings-on are more likely entailed by a dynamically shifting, adaptively filtered subset of neural goings-on.