Hi John, List,
I appreciate you keep trying to get us back on target with your comments.
I think the reference Edwina brought forward is the best I've seen so
far for these arguments with respect to the neurophysiology of Thirdness
mediation. Do you agree?
I think I understand your points on slides 7-11 of your short version
http://jfsowa.com/talks/vrshort.pdf.
However, what stopped me in this deck is slide #4. Framing the ML
methods into the triadic triangle format you prefer (as do I) seems to
imply you are relating these ML methods to the universal categories. Is
that your intent? If so, I'd love to hear the rationale behind that.
Best, Mike
On 8/19/2018 8:56 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
On 8/18/2018 5:41 PM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
I can see from the images that you refer to each of these Peircean
categories taking place in a different part of the brain.
That's not what I meant. The categories are correlated with the
interconnections of different areas.
For further explanation, I'll have to refer to several diagrams.
Instead of the 117-slide long version, please download the 21-slide
short version: http://jfsowa.com/talks/vrshort.pdf
Slide 7 asks "What is cognition?" and summarizes the answer by
the psychologist Lawrence Barsalou. That is useful background.
After that, slides 8 to 11 discuss the experiment of teaching
14 students about the workings of four devices: bathroom scale,
fire extinguisher, disk brake system, and trumpet. At different
stages of learning, they asked the students questions about those
four devices and recorded the fMRI scans of their brains while
they were answering.
Instead of showing the scans of the left sides of their brains
(which are dominated by the language processing), they showed the
scans of the right sides (which are dominated by the processes of
imagining and interpreting the images).
All 14 students had similar brain activations for the same 3 kinds
of questions about the 4 different devices. It's significant that
all 168 patterns (14 x 3 x 4) were remarkably similar.
For my summary of the study, please review slides 8 and 9.
For the full article, the link is at the bottom of slide 8.
Then slide 10 summarizes issues about Intentionality, which is
the most characteristic aspect of Thirdness. It quotes Brentano
and Lynn Margulis before summarizing Peirce's views.
Finally, slide 11 relates the brain scans to 1ns, 2ns, and 3ns.
Following are three quotations from that slide, each followed
by my further commentary:
1. "Perception is based on localized percepts or prototypes. It
classifies phenomena by the monadic predicates of Firstness
(fMRI image #1)."
What is critical here is not which part of the brain lights up,
but the fact that only one very narrow area is active. In this
case, its the visual cortex, which is active in both direct
perception and in mental imagery of remembered or anticipated
scenes. Auditory or tactile perception would be localized in
different, but equally narrow areas.
2. "Long-distance connections in the parietal lobes support dyadic
relations that connect all sensory and motor modalities. They
represent the structures of Secondness (image #2)."
By long-distance, I mean crossing from one lobe to another.
In image #2, the visual cortex is still active, but there is
more activation in related areas, especially the parietal lobes,
which relate the visual aspects various to kinds of patterns.
The tactile and motor areas are also active. This kind of
activity would be characteristic of dyadic relations that
relate structural aspects of the four devices.
3. "The frontal lobes process the mediating Thirdness in reasoning,
planning, causality, and intentionality (image #3)."
The frontal lobes, which are the most active, involve the most
complex reasoning. The frontal lobes are also adjacent to the
tactile and motor areas that are also involved in reasoning
about how the four devices work.
Mike B
The full paper without charge [on "Gradual Progression from Sensory
to Task-Related Processing in Cerebral Cortex"]
http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/30/E7202.full.pdf
This paper is consistent with the one about the four devices.
Note that image #1 in slide 11 of vrshort.pdf would be the first
area to become active when someone is looking at the device.
Then images #2 and #3 would become active when thinking about
tasks that use the device.
John
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