New Map of Meaning in the Brain Changes Ideas About Memory

 New Map of Meaning in the Brain Changes Ideas About Memory from Quanta:

“A lot of people have this intuitive idea that the perceptual experience is like a roaring flame, and the memory experience is like a flickering candle,” said Brice Kuhl, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon. But memories clearly aren’t just a weaker echo of the original experience. The physical shifts seen in these recent experiments instead suggest that systematic changes in the representations themselves encode an experience that is entirely distinct but still tethered to the original.

Huth’s work provides new insights into the nature of that transformation. Perhaps memory isn’t as visually driven as we thought. Maybe it’s more abstract, more semantic, more linguistic. “We often have this impression that we have these fantastic visual representations of things,” Baker said. “You feel like you can see it. But maybe you can’t.”

Two on Ukraine

 Why didn't they stop it? By Tony Wood at LRB

Just before the assault. He seems to be getting against it. But it happened. May be 'After method deluge' moment of Putin. May be the aim is still to get Ukrainians to the negotiating table. After from the discussion is the whyof Nato expansion and who is behind it. Waxing the military industrial complex?

P.S. A discussion of the last aspect here

Two on the current tensions about Ukraine

 Is the Ukraine ‘crisis’ just another US charade? By Jack F. Matlock Jr

The reason the US wants war in Ukraine is ultimately all about the dollar by Thomas J. Penn

See also the first author's blog https://jackmatlock.com/2022/01/putins-aims-in-ukraine/

Links to consciousness discussions

 Consciousness and the Physical World, edited by V. S. Ramachandran and Brian Josephson, Review by Ashtosh Jagalekar

What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness? : We brought Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth together to share their insights into neuroscience’s big question.

Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: The Bridge Between Mind and Brain by Filippo Cieri and Roberto Esposito

A BESTIARY OF TOPOLOGICAL OBJECTS

 By N.P.Strickland here. I get a mention:

"12.3. Swarup’s homotopy classification. Let M be the category of 3-manifolds with a given basepoint. The morphisms from 𝑀 to 𝑀′ are homotopy classes of pointed maps which have degree one (in other words, we require that 𝑓∗[𝑀] = [𝑀′] ∈ 𝐻3𝑀′).

Let 𝒢 be the category of pairs (𝜋, 𝑢), where 𝜋 is a group and 𝑢 ∈ 𝐻3𝐵𝜋. The morphisms from (𝜋,𝑢)to(𝜋′,𝑢′)arehomomorphisms𝑓:𝜋→− 𝜋′ suchthat(𝐵𝑓)∗𝑢=𝑢′.

Given a manifold 𝑀 ∈ M, there is an obvious map 𝑞: 𝑀 →− 𝐵𝜋1𝑀, and we can define 𝜁𝑀 = 𝑞∗[𝑀] ∈ 𝐻3𝐵𝜋1𝑀. We thus get an object 𝐹𝑀 = (𝜋1𝑀,𝜁𝑀) of 𝒢, and it is easy to see that this gives a functor 𝐹 : M →− 𝒢 . Swarup proved that this functor is full [43]. It follows that 𝐹 𝑀 is isomorphic to 𝐹𝑀′ if and only if 𝑀 is homotopy equivalent to 𝑀′, by an orientation preserving equivalence. In other words, 𝐹𝑀 is a complete invariant of the homotopy type of 𝑀."

Mark Borrello and David Sepkoski Write about E.O.Wilson

 Ideology as biology

Consciousness and the Physical World

 Edited by Brian Joephson and M.S.Ramachandran, proceedings of a conference in 1978-79 is available in the archives here https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.3737.pdf Foreword by F.J.Dyson

Marx on alienation, book Review

 https://www.leftvoice.org/marx-alienation-and-communism/?fbclid=IwAR1w25O97MFDUUv79Jtxi4y5W-CesebkA-3Yue6QTOMidBAvuOwHpbKqgLs

Dylan Daniel on Helmholtz

 "The key to this understanding came from Kant’s distinction between appearance and reality. Helmholtz then used his physiological knowledge to update Kant’s thinking to say that although we have no direct access to the thing-in-itself, we do receive information about it which allows our brains to update the model our minds have of it, and so the world. Research into the workings of the senses and nerve fibers allowed Helmholtz to construct this theory, just as today cognitive neuroscientists test and research various ideas related to it. Modern cognitive neuroscience has so far been unable to improve on his observation that “Inductive inferences, as acquired by the unconscious work of memory, play a prominent part in the building up of concepts” (Koenigsberger, p.428). This seminal idea of the influence of the unconscious on the brain’s construction of our thought is (again) the direct offspring of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the science of Hermann von Helmholtz."

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894

The next question is how we are able to communicate with others and can be sure whether we are talking of the ‘same’ thing? Is is it because we share genes from some common ancestor and come up with similar models?