Dr Nick
@nmwilkinson
Hey, everybody! Not that kind of doctor. Embodied cognition, AI and robotics, eating behaviour, flavour & the senses Mostly cathartic ranting Personal account
I appreciate i am using 'balance' in a somewhat non-standard way - i am proposing balance is a somewhat different thing from current conception (i.e. not-falling, afaict). Imv it is a self-regulatory function solving a general biophysical task, of which postural control is one special case
Super, thanks :) The highlighted excerpt below is imv a nice frame for the problem. I try to lay out conceptually a general biophysical model of how the balancing task is defined ('value function') in the paper. Solving it is going to be a special case for a given morphology and control system
Depends what one takes from 'direct' I suppose. I don't take it to mean 'magic', that would be silly
Because the interpretation of many contemporary/since results is conditioned on mis-attributing this non-existent result. There is a whole edifice of interpretation built on it. It's like this👇🏻
Imv to the extent that R is just a mode of interpretation as below, there's nothing to argue about. Saw a nice @wiringthebrain.bsky.social talk recently situating Rs as epiphenomena of architectural context. On that view, one could use the R concept, or ditch it for just architecture & dynamics...
The dividing line question is whether in addition to being a model in this sense, the brain also *contains* a model(s) of the body in a sense similar to a CAD model - abstract, defined wrt to mathematical coordinate frames rather than by embodied connectivity and geometry etc.
Correct me if I'm wrong, ADW, but I think pretty much all of us are happy to say that the nervous system *is* in various ways a model of the behaving body. E.g. it has a tightly coupled spatial architecture. And most would be happy with the idea that nested models on this framing can exist too...
I think much of Grace's confusion arose from misreading "reject R as an explanatory posit" as "representations don't exist". But even @tyrellturing.bsky.social agrees that representation (on his definition) is an interpretive tool, not a valid explanatory posit.
Well for one thing 'representations' is used to mean all sorts of very different things, so maybe they are denying the existence of something other than the representations you are certain must exist
It is easier for USAmericans to imagine the end of the Republic than the end of the Republican party
Fair enough. But I think it's accurate cos they deliberately undermined, disarmed, and disbanded the anti-brexit movement cos it was politically difficult for Labour. This was their strategy. Surrender was a price worth paying (for them) to make it go away, but cost us all. Longtime grudge for me👇
This strikes me as substantive and not absurd. You may have a sound response. Great. But "gah obvs brain activity and changes are very important" is not it. E.g. @mljanderson.bsky.social concedes that point off the bat here👇🏻 So forever returning to it feels like deflection via strawman
Haven't read that one. Anyway, it's not like I'm the guy who gets to decide. My grumble is that having a core concept that everyone uses differently and is slippery enough to mean almost anything at all does not enable useful discussion, only pointless semantic arguments bsky.app/profile/nmwi...
I got some funny looks when i proposed something along these lines in my PhD back in 2014
Welcome to the swamp of bullshit. We have arrived at the very location we set out for. It was 'politically necessary', apparently
Yup. Maybe we just can't make the objective measuring device, could easily be a limit of objective measurement devices which says little about the physical reality of subjective experience
True story. This paper is cited hundreds of times as showing the opposite of the results it reported