Reading Notes: July 24th, 2022

“Mind is, therefore, in its every act only apprehending itself, and the aim of all genuine science is just this; that mind shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth. An out-and-out other simply does not exist for mind.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, §377) 

“A true philosophic system is not to be looked upon as a soulless jointing of hypotheses; it is a living fabric which, with all its endeavour to be objective, must have a well-marked individuality. Hence it is not to be regarded as the special property of academic philosophy-mongers, to be hacked up by them into technical views, but is to be regarded as a form of life and is to be treated as a theme of literature of infinite interest to humanity.” (Bhattacharyya, Studies in Vedantism, ix) 

“Here is the central hypothesis of cognitive science: Thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures....A representation is a structure that stands for something by virtue of relations such as similarity, causal history, and connections with other representations. For example, a photograph of you is a representation of you because it looks like you and because photography causally links it with you. The word “cat” is not similar to cats, but there is a causal link between utterances of this word and the presence of cats, as well as relations between the concept cat and other concepts. Let us look at how individual neurons and especially groups of neurons can serve as representations….A typical neuron may fire hundreds of times per second, and we can think of it as representing a degree of presence or absence of what it represents. For example, if a unit represents the concept cat, then its firing many times per second signifies the presence of a cat. However, all natural and most artificial neural networks use distributed representations in which concepts are encoded by a population of neurons: a group of neurons represents a concept by virtue of a pattern of firing rates in all of the neurons. Thus a group of neurons, each with its own firing rate, can encode a large number of aspects of the world….A single neuron can represent a feature of the world as the result of being tuned to fire more rapidly when that feature is presented.” (Thagard, Mind: An Introduction to Cognitive Science, 151-152)