I present an account of mental representation based upon the ‘SINBAD’ theory of the cerebral cortex. If the SINBAD theory is correct, then networks of pyramidal cells in the cerebral cortex are appropriately described as representing, or more specifically, as modelling the world. I propose that SINBAD representation reveals the nature of the kind of mental representation found in human and animal minds, since the cortex is heavily implicated in these kinds of minds. Finally, I show how (...) SINBAD neurosemantics can provide accounts of misrepresentation, equivocal representation, twin cases, and Frege cases. (shrink)

We propose that a top priority of the cerebral cortex must be the discovery and explicit representation of the environmental variables that contribute as major factors to environmental regularities. Any neural representation in which such variables are represented only implicitly (thus requiring extra computing to use them) will make the regularities more complex and therefore more difficult, if not impossible, to learn. The task of discovering such important environmental variables is not an easy one, since their existence is only indirectly (...) suggested by the sensory input patterns the cortex receives – these variables are “hidden.” We present a candidate computational strategy for (1) discovering regularity-simplifying environmental variables, (2) learning the regularities, and (3) using regularities in perceptual and decision-making tasks. The SINBAD computational model discovers useful environmental variables through a search for different, but nevertheless highly correlated functions of any kind over non-overlapping subsets of the known variables, this being indicative of some important environmental variable that is responsible for the correlation. We suggest that such a search is performed in the neocortex by the dendritic trees of individual pyramidal cells. According to the SINBAD model, the basic function of each pyramidal cell is (1) to discover and represent one of the regularity-simplifying environmental variables, and (2) to learn to infer the state of its variable from the states of other variables, represented by other pyramidal cells. A network of such cells – each cell just attending to representation of its variable – can function as a sophisticated and useful inferential model of the outside world. (shrink)

The merit of the SINBAD model is to provide an explicit mechanism showing how the cortex may come to develop detectors responding to correlated properties and therefore corresponding to the sources of these correlations. Here I argue that, contrary to the article, SINBAD neurosemantics does not need to rely on teleofunctions to solve the problem of misrepresentation. A number of difficulties for the teleofunction theories of content are reviewed and an alternative theory based on categorization performance and statistical (...) relations is argued to provide a better account and to come closer to the practice in neuroscience and to powerful intuitions on swampkinds and on broad/narrow content. (shrink)

There is good evidence that the cerebral cortex is the seat of the human mind, so an understanding of representation in the cortex could help us understand the nature of mental representation. I argue that the cortex represents in the way that models do; it is an evolutionarily designed model-building machine. The cortex belongs to a general class of model-building machines that produce isomorphisms to structures in the environment by interacting with them. The representational content of a particular model produced (...) by such a machine is determined by the operational principles according to which the machine was designed, and the history of machine-environment interaction that resulted in the production of that model. ;I explore the possibility that the operational principles according to which the cerebral cortex was designed, i.e. aspects of its causal profile that were selected for, are those described by the SINBAD theory. The SINBAD theory implies that it is the biological function of the cortex to make its constituent neurons come to interact in a way that is isomorphic to regularities structured around "sources of correlation". In the context of this isomorphism, it is the function of a particular SINBAD cell to correspond to a particular source of correlation, the one that is responsible for that cell's tuning. In other words, the cortex builds models of environmental regularities structured around sources of correlation. ;Understanding mental representation as cortical representation of this kind allows us to explain a number of important and/or puzzling features of mental intentionality as we know it: the possibility of equivocation, misrepresentation, empty representation, and twin cases, the relation between concepts and inferential roles, how it is possible for us to acquire objective concepts and beliefs via our subjective and idiosyncratic senses, and the distinction between usefulness and truth. I conclude by outlining an account of the occurrent propositional attitudes as non-representational uses of a SINBAD model that has been built up through experience. Non-representational use is cashed out in terms of causal role. Together with an account of the non-occurrent attitudes, this yields an understanding of the nature of psychological explanation. (shrink)

“Adam was hurled into Hindustan. In this land there is a mountain called Serandib, and it is reported that there is no higher mountain in all the universe. Adam landed on this mountain.” The subject of Serendib plays an important role in both the geographical and travel literature of the Arabs. Serendib, or Sarandib, is the transcription of the Singhalese name Sinhaladîpa, which means “island of the descendants of lions” (singha, “lions,” in Singhaly). Already, in the Middle Ages, in the (...) year 949, Arab merchants, who were well acquainted with the island of Ceylon, set up a branch in Colombo. The natural beauty and wealth of the island so touched the imagination of Arab voyagers that it appeared in the sixth voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, and it was also believed that Adam lived on the island after having been driven from Paradise: “The island of Serendib is located directly under the equinoctial line…. Men fish for pearls along its banks and at the mouths of its rivers, and some of its valleys are rich in diamonds. As an act of faith I myself took a trip to the mountain, to the very spot where Adam was banished after being exiled from Paradise. I even climbed to its summit.”This excerpt, from The Thousand and One Nights, well summarizes the feelings of those Arab merchants whose accounts of their travels, in large measure, contributed to the spread of myths and legends about Ceylon. (shrink)

From the ancient Egyptian tale of a Shipwrecked Sailor through to Sinbad and Robinson Crusoe, the stranded castaway living and philosophizing alone on a strange, desert island is a theme which has captured the imaginations of writers spanning cultures and millennia. Most familiar to Western literary historians is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which inspired generations of writers from Jonathan Wyss and William Golding to Michel Tournier and J.M.Coetzee. However, little attention has been paid to Defoe’s antecedents, such as the (...) remarkable HayyIbn Yaqzan by twelfth-century Arab physician and philosopher, Muhammad Ibn Tufayl. Mahmoud Baroud here conducts a detailed comparative textual analysis of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe, and concludes that Daniel Defoe was likely to have been deeply influenced by Ibn Tufayl’s Arabic text. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature, along with medieval Arabic literature, culture, and philosophy. (shrink)

Did the first men dream their voyages before making them? Or did they have to first take to the sea so as to be able to later embark on the ship of their imagination and thus embroider on accounts of their journeys? Is it the prestige of the dream that spurred them on to run the risk of translating it into a real experience? Or is it the account of authentic voyages that supported that of imaginary voyages? These are questions (...) that make one dream and that we continue to ask ourselves, even though we suspect that they are idle, since it is impossible to answer them with certitude. All that we know, or think we know, is that among the first written testimonies that have come down to us, real and imaginary voyages are mixed and confused in an alloy of a homogeneity that resists analysis and is perhaps an image of the reception they had from their original public. Who knows if the Greeks who listened in the middle of the first millennium B.C. to the poets singing the return of Ulysses to Ithaca, could, or wanted to, untangle the part of truth from that of poetry? Who knows if the Arabs who, at the end of the following millennium heard the enchanting tale of the voyages of Sinbad, distinguished, as the Western orientalists of the 19th century must have done, the real ports of call and the shipwrecks experienced in the dreamed places and fantastic adventures? (shrink)

There is a lack of connection between the cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary approaches to the study of the mind, in philosophy as well as the sciences. For instance, although Millikan may display a thorough understanding of evolutionary theory in her arguments for the adaptive value of substance concepts, she gives scant attention to what could be the neural substrates of these concepts. Neuroscience research calls into question her assumption that substance concepts play a role in practical skills and suggests that (...) conceptual knowledge in the brain may be organized by perceptual features rather than by individuals and natural kinds. (shrink)