Is Information in the Brain Represented in Continuous or Discrete Form?

Re:Is Information in the Brain Represented in Continuous or ... by nanna on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @10:26AM (#17126111)

It frustrates me that the engineering community has so little recollection of its own history that it doesn't even contextualise /this/ question as one of the founding problematics of its own specialism, and our cybernetic age in general. The question of whether the brain functions discreetly ('digitally') or continuously ('analogue') was one of the three main debates at the Macy Meetings in the 1940s. [0]

For example Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts effectively staked their careers on the brain being a fully digital network, as a computer. But John Von Neumann was more cautious, arguing that the digital function of the brain rested on a chemical, analogue foundation, and that it was unclear whether messages were coded in a digital or analogue way. Julian Bigelow argued that mathematicians and physicists preferred to ignore the biological structure of neurons and identify them with their digital operation.

This debate strikes at the heart of the debate between the difference between analogue and digital, and in my opinion it's a philosophical, not just physiological, problem.

[0] For anyone interested in this history I'd highly recommend Ronald R. Kline's work, especially The Cybernetic Moment (p 46-47)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Is Information in the Brain Represented in Continuous or ... by no_identd on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @11:36AM (#17126692)

Why not both? Left neocortex hemisphere handles discrete, right handles continuous. Iain McGilchrist makes a convincing argument for that in his book The Master and His Emissary.

Also, the main difference between 'hardware' and 'wetware' arises as a consequence of a very simple cybernetic principle, to quote Wikipedia:

"Also in 1960, [Manfred Clynes] discovered a biologic law, "Unidirectional Rate Sensitivity," the subject, in 1967, of a two-day symposium held by the New York Academy of Science. This law, related to biologic communication channels of control and information, is basically the consequence of the fact, realized by Clynes, that molecules can only arrive in positive numbers, unlike engineering electric signals, which can be positive or negative. This fact imposes radical limitations on the methods of control that biology can use. It cannot, for example, simply cancel a signal by sending a signal of opposite polarity, since there is no simple opposite polarity. To cancel, a second channel involving other, different molecules (chemicals) is required. This law explains, among other things, why the sensations of hot and cold need to operate through two separate sensing channels in the body, why we do not actively sense the disappearance of a smell, and why we continue to feel shocked after a near-miss accident."