Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged representation →  View Popular

There is a devious solution to this problem, however, and split-brain patients have been observed
to discover it. Whereas ordinary tactile sensations are represented contralaterally--the signals go
to the opposite hemisphere--pain signals are also represented ipsilaterally. That is, thanks to the
way the nervous system is wired up, pain stimuli go to both hemispheres. Suppose the object in
the bag is a pencil. The right hemisphere will sometimes hit upon a very clever tactic: hold the
pencil in your left hand so its point is pressed hard into your palm; this creates pain, and lets the
left hemisphere know there's something sharp in the bag, which is enough of a hint so that it can
begin guessing; the right hemisphere will signal "getting warmer" and "got it" by smiling or other
controllable sings, and in a very short time "the subject"--the apparently unified "sole inhabitant"
of the body--will be able to announce the correct answer.

Now either the split-brain subjects have developed this extraordinarily devious talent as a
reaction to the operation that landed them with such radical accessibility problem, or the
operation reveals--but does not create--a virtuoso talent to be found also in normal people.
Surely, Gazzaniga claims, the latter hypothesis is the most likely one to investigate. That is, it
does seem that we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior,
more or less unified, but sometimes disunified, and we always put the best "faces" on it we can.
We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our
autobiography.

According to a new study of the neural mechanisms of hypnosis-induced paralysis, Braid's definition was remarkably accurate. The study, published in the journal Neuron, demonstrates that hypnosis does indeed lead to increased activity in areas of the brain involved in attention, as well as in other areas involved in mental imagery and self-awareness. Hypnosis can therefore exert control over bodily movements by enhancing mental representations of the self (or self-imagery) and focusing attention on them. 

Because of the way in which the experiment was designed, the fMRI data allowed the researchers to test two hypotheses. First, they could test whether hypnotic suggestion of paralysis suppressed the intention to move, by analyzing brain activity during the preparatory interval, or whether it inhibited the movements themselves. Second, they could determine whether hypnotic paralysis involves the same inhibitory neural mechanisms as voluntary suppression of movement, by comparing the brain activity measured during the "go" and "no go" conditions under hypnosis and in the control trials in which participants feigned paralysis.

We consider ‘theory of mind’ at two levels. The first concerns how the goals and intentions of another agent or player are represented. We use optimum control theory to reduce the problem to representing value-functions of the states that players can be in. These value-functions prescribe optimal behaviours and are specified by the utility, payoff or reward associated with navigating these states.

What's more complex, a cucumber or a Boeing 747? The answer is unknown. We have no way to measure the difference in order and organization between the two and don't have good working definition of complexity to even frame the question. Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, has counted 42 different mathematical definitions of complexity.

Bayes developed a statistical method to evaluate the probability of any given hypothesis being true under changing conditions. The concept is straightforward: The probability of two things happening together is the probability of the first given the second, times the probability of the second. This allows the certainty of a single inference to be weighed according to how much additional evidence exists at any particular time. The "Bayesian" approach has emerged in many guises over the past century and has proved very useful in computer science applications like machine learning.

Everything I've read suggests that the active models do a much better job of teaching the essential concepts, and in the end, that's the most important thing,