Page 120 - Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Neural Networks and Brain Computing

108 CHAPTER 5 From Synapses to Ephapsis

environmental context. World objects do not have prearranged labels, and there
is no homunculus in brain supervising perception and cognition.
6. There Is No Central Control. There are no symbols, rules, logic, computations,
programming, or algorithms stored in the brain. Central Process is the hidden
homunculus of computing paradigm. When an infant learns to walk or speak, no
one process has to coordinate the emergence of walking or speaking behavior; it
emerges, like in all open systems, through entrainment of internal components,
that is, sensory neurons, interneurons, motor neurons, and muscle structures and
external components such as objects, forces, and other people.
7. Action Guides Perception. Stimuli do not “arrive” in the brain, action precedes
and guides perception. Frontal lobes of cortex form a plan first and then instruct
senses to confirm or deny the presence of data needed for current action. There
is a context for each percept.
8. Multimodality Is Grounded in Motor Action. Every perceptual concept requires
a motor action plus one or more correlated percepts, like speech, sight, or
touch. When we eat an apple, we execute an action with our teeth, lips, and
jaws and at the same time, we also perceive through eyes, nose, lips, and taste
buds. Most perception occurs within our body. Reafference, proprioception,
and even exteroception consist mostly of the organism observing itself and its
actions.

Humans love metaphors. According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson [18]
“Metaphor is not just a matter of language, human thought processes are largely
metaphorical.” It matters which metaphors we use. During 400 hundred years of
Cartesian dualism, we went from the brain as a clock metaphor to the brain as a
computer metaphor. It may be the time for a new metaphor, one based not on static
structures, modularity, and syntax, but on dynamic fields where the brain is seen
more like a vast ocean of waves forming and reforming in real time in never ceas-
ing maelstroms ignited by chaotic but nonrandom attractors such as the Lorenz
attractor.
From brain as a clock to brain as a computer to brain as a field of waves.