3 ms·

Why must mental functions be localized to physical components?

• doug_durham 3y ago
  Are you suggesting a metaphysical structure? I don't understand what you are getting at.
  • bsdpufferfish 3y ago
    Even if you are a full materialist it's fallacious to assume there is one "part" that does something, like it's a factory assembly. Instead it might be a function of the composition of brain parts. It's like asking which part of a bat makes it fly. The wings? Well kind of, but you need more than that. I guess you can fly without feet... it's just not a well formed question.
    • red75prime 3y ago
      If you ask question a bit differently, then it's not a mystery at all. Why brain parts that have neural structure, which is conductive to fine and agile motor control, perform motor control?
      • bsdpufferfish 3y ago
        Why is it in a part? Which part of the violin makes it sound in tune?
    • dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Even if you are a full materialist it's fallacious to assume there is one "part" that does something, like it's a factory assembly. Instead it might be a function of the composition of brain parts. Its true that a particular function may mot be localizable more specifically than the brain (or even the whole body), because defining it as a distinct function may not reflect the organization of conponents within the body. But that's still performed by a defined physical system, and there are still sub-functions necessary to perform that function that are localizable to narrower components. > It's like asking which part of a bat makes it fly. Its like that in that we absolutely can describe specific parts of the bat and what each contributes to flight.
• chrisfosterelli 3y ago
  They probably aren't, at least at the level we often teach. Much of our knowledge about the brain comes from observing people who have pieces missing and seeing how their behaviour differs from a normal adult or putting people in an fMRI scanner and saying "wow, that area used a lot of oxygen compared to baseline". This, and a scientist's nature to classify things, led to a lot of overoptimistic categorization of brain function to specific regions. As neuroscience has matured the field has grown to recognize a more nuanced view that most computation in the brain is more distributed than we first assumed, and different areas are often involved in overlapping functions. It can also change over time or after extreme brain trauma. But it's not correct to say it's fully distributed either. The honest answer is we still have an extremely poor understanding of how the brain works.
• dragonwriter 3y ago
  Because physical components are all that exists.
• eurekin 3y ago
  My guess: because it's useful with following analogy. We use text embeddings to represent concepts written words. They lack the nuance, when the same word has different meaning in different concepts. LLM's use text embeddings and enrich it with the Attention mechanism. For words, that in reality are used to represent a single concept, a text embedding is working perfectly on it's own. For those concepts that are context dependent, we're using the attention mechanism to gently guide the text embedding closer to the intended, identified by surrounding words, meaning. That's the role of the Value vector of the K, Q, V triplet in the Attention mechanism to be precise. So, this is a simplistic approach, which corresponds to the "first approximation", which could be good enough for some cases. We don't know which exactly yet, but we'll know, once enough evidence is given to the contrary. It's not a good model, but a very good approach in order to do research in a stepwise manner. With time, it'll get more and more nuanced, one approximation at a time.
• fallingfrog 3y ago
  What other sort are there? Imaginary components? Metaphorical components?