I work in neuroscience and I don’t agree that it is on much firmer ground that psychology. In fact, as some people in the community have noted, the neuroscience mainstream is probably still in the pre-paradigmitic stage (using Kuhn). And believe it or not, a lot of neuroscientists naively do believe that the brain is like a computer (maybe not exactly one, but very close).
As someone who also works in the neuroscience field and is somewhat sympathetic to the Gibsonian perspective that Chemero (mentioned in the essay) subscribes to, being able to decode cortical activity doesn’t necessarily mean that the activity serves as a representation in the brain. Firstly, the decoder must be trained and secondly, there is a thing called representational drift. If you haven’t, I highly recommend reading Romain Brette’s paper “Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain?”
He asks a crucial question, who/what is this representation for? It certainly is a representation for the neuroscientist, since they are the one who presented the stimuli and are then recording the spiking activity immediately after, but that doesn’t imply that it is a representation for the brain. Does it make sense for the brain to encode the outside world, into its own activity (spikes), then to decode it into its own activity again? Are we to assume that another part of this brain then reads this activity to translate into the outside world? This is a form a dualism.
Huh, that’s so strange lol. I guess AliPay will probably be all you need. Since you’re going to Shanghai, I actually really enjoyed the propaganda museum.
I live in China (Hangzhou, actually). Just to add to what people have already said. WeChat now accepts international credit/debit cards and it works fairly reliably now (my girlfriend recently visited and she was able to use both WeChat and AliPay), but I think AliPay is probably more reliable. I’m fairly confident they both would work in Guilin/Changsha, but bring cash just in case.
That’s fine, I don’t think you’re being an ass at all. Brette is saying that just because there is a correspondence between the measured spike signals and the presented stimuli, that does not qualify the measured signals to be a representation. In order for it to be a representation, it also needs a feature of abstraction. The relation between an image and neural firing depends on auditory context, visual context, behavioural context, it changes over time, and imperceptible pixel changes to the image also substantially alters neural firing. According to Brette, there is little left of the concept of neural representation once you take into account all of this and you’re better off calling it a neural correlate.