SUO: Re: "Abstract" and "dimensionality"
Following are two articles from today's issue of Science Daily
that shed some light on what is going on in the brain. The first
article is about the areas of the brain that are activated when
blind people read Braille:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/01/020102080342.htm
Opening paragraph:
"Individuals who have been blind from birth use different parts
of their brain when they read Braille than do those who lost their
sight later in life -- a difference that sheds new light on the
relationship between thought and language."
The second article is about the effects of that wonder drug
called the placebo:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/01/020102074543.htm
Opening paragraph:
"UCLA researchers are the first to report altered brain
function in people who respond favorably to placebo treatment
for major depression. In addition, the findings show these
changes are different than those found in people who respond
to antidepressant medication."
What these studies show is that similar effects at the behavioral
level can result from different kinds of neural processes in
different individuals. We all know that what goes on inside
a computer is very different from what goes on inside the human
brain, but there is accumulating evidence that different brains
can achieve similar results with different kinds of internal
processes.
That is an important reason for analyzing the results or methods
of human thinking in a way that is independent of the terminology
and mechanisms of the human brain (or soul or psyche or whatever
other term anyone might care to use).
The term I prefer to apply to all processes that might be performed
by the human brain (or the brains of other animals) is "semiosis",
which is the process of sign manipulation that is analyzed and
characterized by the field of semiotics.
All brains and all computers are semiotic processors that take
signs as inputs and generate signs as outputs. The study of signs
and the processes that interpret and generate them can be expressed
in terms that do not involve any reference to psychology, neurons,
or computer programs.
In fact, semiotics is related to psychology as mathematics is related
to physics. More precisely, semiotics is that branch of applied
mathematics that analyzes signs in the same way that the differential
equations of applied mathematics analyze physical fields.
John Sowa