I stumbled upon this video on ViHart's second channel (the girl that does those nice math videos), and found it fascinating! The delivery is not really youtuby and polished, but I find it adds weight to the fact she just wanted to share a bit about this theory.
What do you think about it? Ever heard of it before?
I had never heard of it. It's fascinating. I agree that some notions are perhaps valuable in their wrongness. I have always felt similarly about Freud. I haven't given much thought to models of the mind for many years. It's something that I should revisit. Personally, I have long been operating with the assumption that consciousness is analogy, a view largely informed by Douglas Hofstadter. My thoughts seem inescapably operations upon symbols, and try as I might, even the most fantastic of thoughts I have are distortions of experience. It seems that my concept of self is just one of these symbols, one that I associate with my physical body, because I have never been able to leave it.
It's a tempting view, and one a lot of AI and cognitive science people have held. I'm sympathetic myself, but note that what people have actually managed to model in terms of symbol manipulation is pretty limited and not far beyond what could be done in the 70s, and you have to be a little suspicious when people who eat sleep and breathe formal logic are telling you that the mind works and awful lot like formal logic. Now statistics is king in AI, and we have people saying the mind is an awful lot like statistics. Compare Jung on alchemists.
I don't see symbol manipulation excluding a stochastic process, however. In fact, Hofstadter argues that the basis has to be non-determinant, in essays like the ant colony, and in the programs he wrote like Jumbo. From what I understand, his rationale is that the analogy processes that comprise consciousness are fluid, and that they bubble up as relationships, but are not concrete symbols meaning that one 'thing' serves as another 'thing'. IMHO he isn't a proponent of formal logic, if anything, he is a proponent of fuzzy logic. This brings to mind something I wrote about memory some time ago. http://www.corpusdord.blogspot.ca/2006/02/memory.html I cannot retain a static image of my grandmother in my mind. It seems involuntarily mutable. Still, I feel that I am consistently thinking about my grandmother. I 'see' in my mind's eye impressions of my grandmother, somewhat visual, somewhat emotional. I 'see' a part of her kitchen as well, but not her in it. I then 'see' her in her cottage. I can 'hear' the sound of her voice, but I do not understand the actual words. These impressions are all fleeting, but unified by a common theme. This inclines me to think that recollection of memory is a dynamic process of the brain, possibly similar to the playing of a film strip. -That memory is a merging of re-experienced impressions, unified by a common theme, 'played' in quick succession. If I think of my grandfather, I get different impressions. However, the same view of their kitchen appears in the sequence. I would guess the memories of my grandfather and grandmother are not wholly discrete in process, or in the function of my brain.Thinking about memory, I picture my grandmother.