Notes

 Posted by Rune on 01/07/2011
Jul 012011
 

The retinal image is an image in a mathematical sense; it is a projection or a mapping. The retinal image is not an image in the sense of a picture – or, if it is, this is entirely accidental. How it looks, or how it reads, plays no role in its performance of its neurophysiological job description. Once we appreciate that the retinal image isn’t something that we see, we lose a grip even on what it means to say that it is upside-down. Upside-down, one must ask relative to what? Who’s to say what counts as upside-down in the head relative to the tasks faced by the nervous system?
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Again, we don’t experience the retinal image; we don’t experience any image , in that sense. We experience the world.

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Antonio Damasio

 Posted by Rune on 27/09/2010
Sep 272010
 

“Descartes’ famous “cogito” — I think, therefore I am” — is profoundly mistaken, according to Damasio. Thinking is a late evolutionary development. Long before there was thought, there was feeling; and we are still primarily feeling organisms. The same mistaken idea underlies the currently fashionable view that mind is a software program embodied in a [...]

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©Rune Peitersen 2010 Although I have the utmost respect for scientific research and am personally fascinated by the field of neurology, recently I find myself questioning the methods used to gather information about brain activity, namely the measuring of electrical fields or electrical activity in the brain. Not the specific methods themselves, whether one uses [...]

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