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Article 5438 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: litow@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Bruce E Litow)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Wrong!
Keywords: brains, the weather
Message-ID: <1992May6.201049.27027@uwm.edu>
Date: 6 May 92 20:10:49 GMT
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Organization: Computing Services Division, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
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Originator: litow@csd4.csd.uwm.edu

In article <10g95oINNkqk@exodus.eng.sun.com> Eric Silber 
(silber@orfeo.eng.sun.com) writes:

> In article <1992May5.201703.17963@psych.toronto.edu> 
> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:

>> ...
>> Brains are no more *essentially* information processing
>> devices than weather systems are. 
>> If you define them as such from the outset,
>> it is little wonder you end up with the conclusion you had assumed. 
>> ...


 > Wrong! Brains contain persistent structures, and persistent patterns of
 > control which maintain specific communication paths with other parts of 
 > the body.  The succession of configurations in brain-state-space is not
 > determined merely by thermal gradients in the body!  The brain controls
 > bodily processes by virtue of its persistent patterns of control, whereas
 > the weather is controlled by thermal gradients etc. not by endogenous
 > (to itself) patterns of control.



Wrong! (I like this.) Weather is a control system, at the very least it
controls itself. There are indeed persistent structures, in fact from
the planetary scale weather is rather boring. At that level it is
`pretty much the same'.
There are conduits of control, e.g., jet streams and nearly
periodic mass-cloud-formations and variations in pressure, etc. 

Mr. Silber is regarding the weather as a chaotic, highly variable
collection of seemingly unrelated, unstable phenomena. But scale is
everything with a dynamical system. I need to be convinced at the
molecular level, or even at the neuronal level, that the brain is,
in some quantifiable sense, more persistent than the elements
of the weather. 

Presentation of criteria by which one dynamical system could be
characterized as an "intrinsic control system" and another not
for purposes that would advance cognitive research would be 
the most important advance in the history of this research.
-- 
Bruce Litow
Computing Services Division
P.O.Box 413, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 53201
414 229 6431    litow@csd4.csd.uwm.edu


