It's lovey to see areas starting to connect, in neuroscience,
AI/comp-sci and philosophy.
Let's remember philosophy started as questions about the cosmos, the
stars. Very much physical reality. And practical too, for agriculture
and navigation. How do we get from A to B and acquire food and other
goods. Over about 5000 years it's come to be "relegated to the
unreal", disparaged by radical positivists who seem unable to make
connections between areas (ironic from a neural POV).
A 'modern' philosopher I'll suggest here on "representation of
space-time" is Harrold Innes [0]. For those who are patient readers
and literate in economics, anthropology, linguistics and computer
science (and working on any field of AI relating language to space)
I'd hope it would be a trove of ideas about how our brains developed
over the ages to handle "space and time".
Some will be mystified how study of railways, maps and fish trading
has anything to do with cognitive neuroscience and representing
space. But it has everything to do with it, because we encode the
things that matter to our survival and those things shape how our
brains are structured. Only very recent modernity and anti-polymath,
hyper-specialisation has made us forget this way that the stars, the
soil and our brains are connected.
I'm sorry I couldn't reply sooner. The sibling comment took all my free time last week (lol).
I've taken great interest in Harrold. It'll be some time until I can deep dive into anything besides work, but he's made my top 10 list of thinkers to know and potentially assimilate into my research framework (I treat theoretical signals not as data but as methods, essentially, a panel of "ways to think about the data" itself).
Thank you very much for the suggestion (and for that write up, it really helped).
> Some will be mystified how study of railways, maps and fish trading has anything to do with cognitive neuroscience and representing space.
Commenting as someone who loves railways, maps and fish(ing) this is both a novel thought and endlessly fascinating. I fear you've provided me another rabbit hole to explore. Thank you!
Let's remember philosophy started as questions about the cosmos, the stars. Very much physical reality. And practical too, for agriculture and navigation. How do we get from A to B and acquire food and other goods. Over about 5000 years it's come to be "relegated to the unreal", disparaged by radical positivists who seem unable to make connections between areas (ironic from a neural POV).
A 'modern' philosopher I'll suggest here on "representation of space-time" is Harrold Innes [0]. For those who are patient readers and literate in economics, anthropology, linguistics and computer science (and working on any field of AI relating language to space) I'd hope it would be a trove of ideas about how our brains developed over the ages to handle "space and time".
Some will be mystified how study of railways, maps and fish trading has anything to do with cognitive neuroscience and representing space. But it has everything to do with it, because we encode the things that matter to our survival and those things shape how our brains are structured. Only very recent modernity and anti-polymath, hyper-specialisation has made us forget this way that the stars, the soil and our brains are connected.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis