Connectionists: practopoiesis, empirical predictions

[Danko Nikolic]

For those interested in practopoiesis:

A paper recently came out on the empirical predictions for testing the 
theory of practopoiesis. One critique of the theory was that it did not 
have testable empirical predictions. Now, this has changed in a 
significant way. I wrote a long paper specifying a number of non-trival 
predictions that can test whether the theory of practopoiesis is 
sustainable or not. The paper is published as a chapter in a book on the 
topic of closed loop experimentation:

***Nikolic D. (2016) Testing the theory of practopoiesis using closed 
loops. In:**Closed Loop Neuroscience 
<http://store.elsevier.com/Closed-Loop-Neuroscience/Ahmed-El-Hady/isbn-9780128024522/>**. 
Ed. Ahmed El Hady. Academic Press.*

Anyone is welcome to run those experiments. And you can also expect from 
me help in designing those experiments.

Notably, I think that these predictions can be also used as an 
inspiration for creating interesting computational models of the 
dynamics of the nervous system -- especially to address challenges of 
the relationship between the brain and mind. The theory and the 
suggested experiments propose a new set of ideas on how the brain 
creates global workspace, attention, working memory, how it perceives, 
etc. There is a rich set of unanswered modeling questions and challenges.

One key point of the theory is that computational models of the brain 
would need to implement closed loop interactions with the environment of 
the organism, and that only then can the models capture brain dynamics 
correctly. This way, the approach proposed by practopoiesis is closely 
related to the work of J.J. Gibson and "4E cognition", and departs from 
the traditional representational view of the brain.

I was happy to see that the original paper on practopoiesis was sitting 
for many months on top of the list of most read articles at JTB. Thanks 
everyone for the interest.

And of course, please feel free to drop comments or ask questions.

Best,

Danko


----------------------------
Prof. Dr. Danko Nikolić

Web:
http://www.danko-nikolic.com
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