Time

As of this week I am in a philosophy group at work. I get one day per week to write philosophical papers - to be published in professional journals.

The first paper will have to be a follow up on the paper that Iris, Pim, Roel and me wrote (and will be published in Theory and Psychology). This paper deals with the question of what the new 'role' of the brain is when one starts thinking about intelligent behavior as being emergent out of an interplay between brain, body and environment. In contrast, of course, stands the cognitivist idea of the brain as being a sort of computer that takes in sense data, deciphers from these sense data a message in the language of thought (i.e.: 'meaning'), and then, on the basis of internally stored knowledge of the world, produces a response in the form of a behavior/act. The new way of seeing the brain, we venture, is that whenever the brain comes into action, *there is already behavior going on*. Lot's of behavior emerges out of the interplay between our body and the world. On a low level, parts of our nervous system help in forming structural couplings between the organism and its environment, leading to adaptive behaviors. This is not based on representing the environment internally, but based on forming a stable 'relation' between brain and aspects of the environment. Once such a low-level sensorimotor relation has been formed, higher parts of the brain can (but don't always) put a *bias* onto this lower level system. This bias works as an internal control parameter in a dynamical system. Increasing the value of the bias gradually can lead to dramatic qualitative changes in behavior. But the bias itself did not cause the behavior, it is just a bias. You need a fully operational sensorimotor loop for the higher brain activation to be able to effect it's causal work. Just like you cannot steer by just having a steering wheel in your hands, you also need to have a car that the steering wheel is attached to. But perhaps this is a bad analogy.

The next step is to take this starting point and write a new paper which has to involve, in some way, the subject of TIME, since time is the main theme of our philosophy group. I proposed that 'timing' is essential for the formation of structural couplings between organism and environment. I will be working out this idea in the coming weeks here in this weblog.