Mental states as macrostates emerging from brain electrical dynamics
| Abstract | Psychophysiological correlations form the basis for different medical and scientific disciplines, but the nature of this relation has not yet been fully understood. One conceptual option is to understand the mental as “emerging” from neural processes in the specific sense that psychology and physiology provide two different descriptions of the same system. Stating these descriptions in terms of coarser- and finer-grained system states macro- and microstates , the two descriptions may be equally adequate if the coarse-graining preserves the possibility to obtain a dynamical rule for the system. To test the empirical viability of our approach, we describe an algorithm to obtain a specific form of such a coarse-graining from data, and illustrate its operation using a simulated dynamical system. We then apply the method to an electroencephalographic recording, where we are able to identify macrostates from the physiological data that correspond to mental states of the subject. © 2009 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.3072788.. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,679 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesIchiro Tsuda (2004). Chaotic Itinerancy is a Key to Mental Diversity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (4):586-587.
Ethan Weed (2008). Looking for Beauty in the Brain. Estetika 45 (1).
N. Thomasson & L. Pezard (1999). Dynamical Systems and Depression: A Framework for Theoretical Perspectives. Acta Biotheoretica 47 (3-4).
Jerome A. Shaffer (1961). Could Mental States Be Brain Processes? Journal of Philosophy 58 (December):813-22.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-04-08Total downloads39 ( #29,795 of 549,070 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,185 of 549,070 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
