cAlarm

i want an iphone app that automatically determines when my first meeting of the day is (from my google calendar), and then automatically sets the alarm on my iphone to go off a predetermined amount of time before that meeting (eg, 1 hour). that way, i don't have to remember to set my alarm all the time. if you read this and don't make the app, please forward this to someone that will....

spatiotemporal calendars

i want a calendar that is built - from the ground up - realizing that people traverse both space and time. in other words, i want certain reminders to occur when i arrive at a particular space-time, not just time. a calendar that operated only in the spatial domain, and not the temporal domain, might have send me a reminder when i arrive next in nyc, or on campus. i often have to remember, for instance, to go to the office upon reaching campus, but i am stuck making a reminder in time, and hoping that i am around at the time the reminder goes off, and not busy. i may want spatiotemporal reminders as well, ie, remind me to call my friend when i get back to nyc and it is september. alternately, when i'm on campus, i'd like to know about seminars that i attend (but i don't care about them when i'm out of town). i believe this would be a very useful function for many people. given the iPhone knows where i am all the time, and what time it is, it seems like a perfect app. i can imagine creating a calendar for various locations in my google account, ie, home, office, new york, europe, etc. then, in each calendar, i can create appointments at specific times, or at arrival times, or arrival times between certain dates/times. appointments could potentially span several calendars (ie, when i'm in baltimore or new york, do something). somebody who makes iphone apps: please make this for the world. thank you.

Juice Fast

So, as you may know, i started a juice fast 3 days ago, mostly because i felt as though i hadn't been eating as healthy as i usually do in the last few months, so i wanted to start over. some interesting things have happened so far.

most notably, prior to starting this fast, i weighed myself a couple times a week, and for the past month or so, seemed to weigh 150 lbs (plus or minus a pound or two). Today, 72 hours in, i weighed in at 145 lbs, 5 lbs less. some important factors to keep in mind are that i typically weigh myself after working out (i.e., naked but dehydrated). this time, it was prior to working out (i.e., clothed and hydrated). nonetheless, it is interesting to speculate....

3500 kcal comprise a pound. for the last 3 days, it has been very easy to calculate how many calories i've ingested, as it is listed right on the bottle. turns out, each day, i ingest about 2000 kcal (4 Bolthouse Farms smoothies), which mean's i've ingested a total of 6000 kcal. to have lost 5 lbs, that means i must have had 5*3500=16,500 kcal fewer than normal. this means i must normally be eating 16,500/3=5500 kcal more. in other words, on an average day (prior to this juice fast), i consume around 7500 kcal! this is almost 4 times the normal amount for human beings. keeping in mind that i am a vegetarian, and mostly subsist on fruits, vegetables, and then some grains, i hope you can appreciate how i must be constantly stuffing my fat face hole.

the end.

so, how should one go about trying to understand how a brain works

so, how would one go about understanding how a computer works. well, unfortunately, the answer to this question largely depends on the motivation for asking it. for instance, if one knows how a PC works, but not a mac, then the answer would look very different then the answer to the same question from somebody who knows nothing about computers at all. thus, to appropriately answer the question: "how should one go about trying to understand how the brain works?" one should probably first specify a set of motivating factors (and maybe also desirata). so, some things we'd like include:

1) memory augmentation: our memories are limited in ways that are often detrimental to quality of life. how often is one arguing about whether or not one spouted a particular utterance? also, if i could remember everything i learned, i wouldn't need to look things up again, or even keep books after reading them.

2) optimal learning: we spend a large fraction of our lives learning knowledge that we then apply to our daily lives, whether it is in the form of wisdom or semantic information or something else, it often takes many years for us to achieve satisfactory mastering of a discipline. if we could learn more faster, technology and development could advance faster as well.

3) creative juices: while "creativity" is not particularly well understood feature of the human experience (at least i haven't found a satisfactory account of it), i still feel comfortable suggesting that if we were more creative, we could more quickly find better solutions to current problems.

4) "objective" perspectives: our lack of predictive power often results in our experiences being severely biased by previous experience. if we could somehow "objectify" our perceptions, we may be better at predicting the responses of others, and therefore be able to have more fruitful relationships.

5) better language: surely, languages are a very cool invention (or discovery, depending on perspective). and yet, they are not quite as expressive as they could be. some ideas are very difficult to express using language (for instance, abstract concepts such as the wave-particle duality). it would be great if somehow we could make languages have more expressive power.

6) love: something we all (or nearly all) of us want more of, both on the receiving and giving sides. if everybody loved one another, i imagine that many of todays problems would cease. clearly, this is a very hippie-dippie idea, and maybe seems somewhat in juxtaposition with a set of desirata for contemporary neuroscience. but, who better to figure out such a thing?

7) introspective accuracy: a common finding in psychological studies is that introspection is simply not that accurate. it'd be great if when we reflected on why we responded in the way we did, we could be more accurate.

although i have just enumerated 7 desirata, only the first two are "real" neuroscientific questions, in the sense that only two can even be expressed as questions using a neural vocabulary. the relationship between neural hardware and creativity, perspective, language, love, and introspection is so tenuous at this point, that it is probably not even worth considering until further notice. furthermore, the first two: learning and memory, are conserved evolutionarily, so we can start out by studying significantly simpler systems.

as a side note, people may argue with my desirata. ok, i'm not for everyone, and neither are my ideas. i'm happy to hear about alternative desirata...

a good analogy for trying to figure out how the brain works

imagine finding a TV screen on the ground, and not knowing what it did or how. how could one figure out how it works. one strategy would be to look at each pixel in isolation, and see how it responded to various inputs, and then try to determine the "pixel-code", mapping the inputs to statistical regularities of the outputs. this might work. alternately, one could start with the simplest TV one could find that shares the same essential properties, and begin exploring the circuit underlying the behavior (ie, the mechanisms). upon developing the underlying operational principles, ie, the functions that resistors, capacitors, etc. perform, one could then scale up to increasingly complex systems. eventually, one could build up to something like a jumbotron, but it would be ill-advised to study a jumbotron, without first understanding a 4" black and white TV.

i think a similar argument applies to neuroscience. we could just start sticking electrodes in the brains of primates and humans, and hope that we can figure things out. or we could start with a much simpler system, and try to unravel the basic governing principles at work. this analogy breaks down, however, in a number of places.

first, i think the things that are especially cool about brains, are things that humans definitely do, and other animals do to a lesser degree. as the brain becomes less complex, the megacool properties become less pronounced. for instance, here is something especially cool that we do. you tell me the meaning of a word, and i then understand it, possibly forever. it is not clear what a homolog of that is in the animal kingdom. fortunately, other supercool attributes of human cognition do seem to have homologs. for instance, our ability to recognize objects. this is a megahard problem computationally. somehow, however, pretty much all animals have figured out how to do it. it is a necessary condition for behavior, at least at a very coarse level (ie, determining whether objects are predators or prey). so, this fear may be mitigated by studying properties that are conserved evolutionarily.

second, analog circuit elements are relatively simple as compared with neurons. this fear assumes that the fundamental (ie, "atomic") unit of neural computation is a neuron. so, one way to mitigate this fear is to postulate that the fundamental unit is something much simpler, ie, a synapse. while synapses are still much more complicated than analog circuit elements (eg, modeling a synapse "accurately" probably requires several states or dimensions, whereas analog circuit elements only require one), they are certainly closer, and it probably doesn't make much sense to postulate anything more atomic than a synapses. on this perspective, neurons become somewhat like integrated circuits, and then the brain becomes the whole circuit board.

third, one could argue that brains are much more general devices than TV's. but maybe that is not true. input to brains come in several possible forms: visual, auditory, etc. similarly, input to TV's come in several possible forms: tuners, cable, DVD's, etc. the output of brains also only have a few possibilities: speech, body language, movements, etc. similarly, TV's output only audio and visual signals. but brains seem to have something that TV's don't: internal states. ok, technically, TV's have 2 internal states: on and off. even if one postulates that different channels correspond to different internal states, the number of possible internal states for a TV pales in comparison to those of a brain, which are innumerable. so, let's switch the analogy from a TV to a computer. a computer (with all the appropriate dressings like an OS, programs, etc.) has may possible internal states. one may think of an internal state as follows: for a particular input, the output is different for a different internal state. so, for a computer, when running one program, a particular key stroke may lead to saving a document, whereas in another program, that same exact keystroke will lead to sending the document. in that sense, each program may be considered to correspond with a different internal state. and yet, computers are still insufficient, as the number of internal states for a computer is discrete and finite (eg, about 1 per program). however, in brains, the number of internal states may not be finite, and is certainly not discrete. for instance, i could be in a relatively good mood, in which case if i get hit by a car, it is not quite that bothersome; whereas if i were in a bad mood, it might be infuriating.

thus it seems as if even analogizing with the most sophisticated devices that humans understand (ie, computers) is insufficient, as the complexity of the human brain - at the level of internal states - is incomparably more complex. nonetheless, this seems as if its the best analogy that we can come up with, so we must work from there.

apocalypse now

quote from about 1000 years ago: "if you don't start accepting my g-d, the world as we know it will end."

quote from about now: "if you don't start recycling or fighting terrorism, the world as we know it will end."

arguments seems about the same to me. new set of beliefs, same old scare tactics. how about we focus our energies on solving real world current problems, famine, disease, poverty, crime, psychiatric illness, etc., instead of spending so much time, energy, and resources trying to prevent problems that may or may not happen?

putative theory of optimal interactions

when interacting with another human being, i think a useful guiding principle is: "do that which maximizes the expected connection between oneself and the other." i do not mean here immediate connection, but rather long term. if one analogizes with dynamics or kinetics equations, we are interested in maximizing the expected value of the steady-state of the system. in game-theoretic terms, this may be akin to the pareto optimal solution (but i don't understand that stuff well enough just yet). in buddhist thought, this may be related to the idea of searching to unify oneself with the other, to the point that one does not even consider oneself different from another (again, i'm not sure i get this stuff yet). bob marley may have referred to this idea as "one love. one heart. let's get together and feel alright," again referring to breaking down the barriers between us and just coming together. so, clearly, this is not a novel or unique idea. nonetheless, it does not seem to be central to many contemporary moral or ethical systems (at least western ones). i came to this thought because i used to act according to a very similar principle: "do that which maximizes the immediate connection between oneself and the other." sadly, this often leads to suffering, as immediate gains often come at the cost of long term suffering.

i find that i am able to act according to this new principle in a way that is not at all paternalistic. this is somewhat in contrast to: "do unto others that which you would like done unto you." i think the appropriate way to understand this thought lies in considering *psychological impact*, not actions. if i like eating cake, but you don't, then i shouldn't get you cake. if i only consider actions, then i would want cake, so i should get cake for others. instead, the important point is i would want things that *i* like, so when getting presents for others i should get them things that they like. however, acting according to this principle, even upon the interpretation that i prefer (a psychological impact emphasis rather then the "act" itself emphasis), leads me to paternalistic behavior or controversy. for instance, a woman wants to sleep with me. she says she'll like it and feels good about the decision. assuming i want to as well, i could go with it, and hope everything would be cool. or i could not go with it, the rationale being that i don't believe it is what she really wants deep down, or i think it would be better for her not to in the long run. either one of those rationales is somewhat dissatisfactory. however, if i consider our long term connection, i would concur only if i believed that it was beneficial for our relationship. this thought process somehow side steps the issue of considering her, or myself, of being paternalistic or selfish. the point is our interaction (which is really the thing at stake).

so, i'm pretty happy with this approach so far. if anybody has some qualms about it, i'd love to hear it. of course, it is not a complete theory of ethical behavior (eg, how might i consider interactions with people i've never met, such as sudanese refugees), nor does it solve all interpersonal relationship problems, but i think its a pretty good place to start.

MIND08

so, while in nyc, i decided to take advantage of the scene, and attend a day long conference called "mind08: the design and elastic mind symposium." here are the highlights, and my reflections:

chuck hoberman: this dude invented the ball that can expand and contract. he is an architect using that idea to build dynamic spaces. turns out, dynamic spaces mostly means motorized blinds with weird shapes. they have a certain aesthetic appeal, but it is not clear whether there is any other practical advantage.

paul steinhardt: this dude has a theory about the universe. essentially, our universe lies on a membrane (or brane for short). apparently, some of the dilemmas posed by string theory can be solved by postulating the existence of another brane, orthogonal to ours. according to his theory, our brane and the other brane lie out the boundary of a dimension, and the branes cyclically collide and then spread apart again, repeating infinitely many times. thus, no single big bang, but rather many big collisions. seemed like a smart and nice dude, and he wrote some contemporary popular science books, the cool thing is that this theory actually makes predictions that should be testable within a few years (we gotta wait for technological developments).

janna levin: she's totally cool. she tackles the question of whether the universe is infinite in size, and if not, does it have boundaries. consider earth: it is both finite and boundaryless. potentially, the universe could be like that too. on earth, if one looks straight ahead, and light bends around the earth, then one would see one's own back side. similarly, if one looked backward, one would see oneself looking backward. if the universe had the same property of finiteness yet boundarylessness, then when we looked at the stars, we might be looking at the same stars at different points in time. it would be difficult to determine whether the different things we saw were actually the same thing in different times or not. that's cool.

kevin slavin: this dude makes games. turns out, games historically have taken place in "somewhere else." typically, some fantastical place that lacks any ties to our material world. he made some games that do not ascribe to that convention. in particular, shark-runners is a game about chasing sharks. you pretend to be on a boat trying to intersect shark paths. you are playing against sharks - real sharks. they implanted sharks with a little GPS, so they are actually playing against you in their real space. Crossroads: a 2 player game, played on one's cell phone. the goal is to run to as many intersections in lower manhattan as possible, in a 30 minute period. this requires actually passing through the intersections. a bad guy may be chasing you as well, so people apparently run away from a virtual villain, but they are running in real space. Plundr is a pirate game, where you live in a virutal world, and can steal or sell or trade goods. however, you can only do things in the place that you currently occupy in real space. if you go to a place on earth that nobody has played from yet, you can create your own island there, make taxes, etc.

henry markram: he is doing something called the "blue brain project" in collaboration with IBM. they want to simulate a human brain, a feat they claim to be able to accomplish in 10 years. besides the fact that it takes 200 PB to even store all the info one would need to simulate, it is not clear to me that the parameters are identifiable, given current experimental constraints. as such, they are limited to finding an equivalence class of parameters for the small stimulus space they are able to explore, and therefore probably lack the ability to simulate anything novel to make useful predictions. time will tell.

overall, it seems as if some people were literally trying to transform the way we understand reality, and others were simply making things that look cool. in general, while i was impressed with many of the designers' grasp of science, it did not seem as if they were able to make a useful contribution to science or understanding, but rather just something pretty that abstractly connected to a cool new scientific idea. also, calling this conference "mind08" seems like a misnomer, as almost nothing was actually about the mind. maybe something like "real design" would have been more appropriate. nonetheless, i'm glad i went.

twitter

so, it occurred to me after sleeping in different spots/cities all the time, that i'd be nice if there were some mechanism in place for me to update you about my whereabouts in an efficient manner. enter "twitter". to start receiving regular updates on my goings and comings to your mobile phone, send follow+jovo to 40404 in a text message. If you decide you don't want updates on your phone anymore, send leave+username.
To get the updates on your in your IM, send follow+jovo in a chat message to Twitter@twitter.com. Send leave+jovo to stop getting updates.

skiing

so, i used to have a policy of no skiing in this country. it often seemed to me like something that rich white people did, but not others. turns out, that is not true in other parts of the world (eg, europe). its probably not true in other parts of this country (eg, many colored people ski on mountains i've never been to). anyway, when i was in utah, everybody was skiing. i felt a little left out, much like i did when all my friends were getting drunk and smoking pot in high school and college. not because i really wanted to partake, but rather, because i was missing out on a bonding experience, which seems to have merit in its own right. as such, i've decided that for next time, i'm going skiing. i needn't feel privilege guilt when it comes to skiing. rather, i think it would be more beneficial to everyone involved if i enjoyed myself, skied with my friends, and recognized and appreciated my privilege. we'll see what happens

matisyahu shabbat tent at langerado 2008

friday night between 6-9PM, at any given time, there were well over 100 people in the tent, and another 50 people standing right outside the tent, because they couldn't fit in! kabbalat shabbat lasted about 1.5 hours just because people were so excited. dancing kept spilling out of the tent and encircling onlookers. i spent most of the time outside the tent telling people as they walked by what was going on. quite often, the response would be something like, "really? ok, i'm going to run in and stay. [to his/her friends] meet me back here in a couple hours."

between 10PM and 4AM is was fairly chill, maybe about 10-20 people in it, mostly just talking. a few guys stayed learning from some judaic books. at about 4AM, it started pooring, so about 50 more people sought shelter in the tent. it was beautiful, as you could hear people yelling, "quick, everybody into the shabbat tent." people who were already in the tent accurately responded, "everybody is welcome, come, stay as long as you want." it seemed as if everybody at the festival (about 50 thousand) knew that the shabbat tent was a safe place where anybody was comfortable. a few people in particular had to say kaddish or yahrtzeit, and were incredibly grateful that the shabbat tent was there for that. other kids told me that they only attended the festival because of the shabbat tent! about 10 kids brought tallis and tefillin, as they knew about the shabbat tent and wanted to daven shacharit sunday morning.

shabbat morning, we had services for a couple hours with over 60 people the entire time, then lunch. at about 2PM, it was so windy, that the entire tent broke and fell down. so, people's lunch moved outside the shabbat tent, and ended at around 3PM. at 5PM, about 30 people came back for mincha, dinner, and maariv. at about 7, another 30 showed up for havdalah. matisyahu played in front of about 25 thousand fans at 8. afterwards, a number of people came back looking for the guys who were teaching the whole time. several of them are planning on going to visit one another to spend shabbat together. many people asked us to have the shabbat tent at the next festival.

all in all, it was pretty awesome. we seemed to have effectively conveyed the idea that everyone was welcome, and this was a safe spiritual place on the festival grounds. many requested our presence at future festivals

cosyne poster

in my poster session, many people came over to tell me how great my spotlight talk was, which was very nice. also, many people who do not work on anything related came over to hear about our work because apparently i presented it as an interesting signal processing problem. all the feedback i got was that it was very nice work, which was really comforting. a number of people asked for the manuscript and/or code which was also nice.

cosyne spotlight talk

so, yesterday i gave a 4 minute presentation before about 500 people. i guess that is the largest number of people i have ever spoken in front of. i presented our work in comparison with the others, clearly demonstrating how much betters ours was :-) upon finishing my "prepared" remarks (which i had literally not prepared at all), i asked the moderator if i had any time left, to which he replied, "10 seconds." so, i turned back to the crowd and said, "thaaaannnnkkkkk yoooooouuuuuuuuu." needless to say, everyone erupted in laughter.....

peace on terror

i'm declaring peace on terror. we could say, "there are a bunch of people in the world that hate us, they hate us so much that they want us to die, they would be willing to kill us, they want to kill us, they would even be willing to sacrifice their lives to harm us. how can we stop this? i know, let's go over to where they are, and kill them! that way, they won't be able to hate us any more, because they'll be dead. problem solved."

i would like to make a different statement. it may start out the same way (although it would probably explain certain elements a little more clearly), but it would drastically different after "how can we stop this?" i might go something like this, "i know, let's go over to where they are, and help them! that way, they won't hate us anymore. instead of spending our money on destroying that which they cherish, let us provide for them. let us teach them how to provide for themselves, such that they will no longer be at the mercy of hunger and poverty."

while the first response may be called "waging a war on terror", the second may be called "waging a peace on terror." somebody must have thought of this before. it seems like it would be pretty easy to get the UN to approve such a waging. further, it seems even some of the more radical dictators would be hard-pressed to forbid other countries from providing aid (they all do already, to my knowledge). so, some practical concerns seem relatively easy to deal with. building love is a pretty easy thing to do: determine the needs of the other, and satisfy those needs, while simultaneously helping the other to satisfy those needs without the help of others. let's do it...

the opposite of war...

the opposite of love is hate. what's the opposite of war? one might be inclined to say peace, but i think that is not correct. rather, peace can be to war as apathy is to hate - the absense of war, not the opposite of it. war is the decision of a nation-state to contribute a huge fraction of its gdp and emotional energy to destroying something. in that sense, foreign aid might be the opposite of war. but again, not really. foreign aid is more like the opposite of minor skirmishes, like when clinton dropped some bombs on iraq. so, i'm still stuck. i think english hasn't yet thought of a word that means the opposite of war. more importantly, it is not clear to me whether any country has even engaged in such an act (which, incidentally, explains the lack of such a word). engaging in this act would entail things like a draft to get people into something like peace corp, where many tens or hundreds of thousands of people from one country flock to another to build things. a good example would be something like what happens after a major natural disaster. instead of just sending money, we send people, goods, money, services. we stay for years helping rebuild their society (as they see fit). people who aren't drafted stay back to help build things to send over there. this could be a multilateral effect, we could form a coalition, etc. as war might be considered a great national expression of fear or hatred, this would be a great national expression of love and compassion. what should we call such a thing?

doubt on knowledge

some posit that "to have knowledge is to know something, and that something is true." i have some problems with that. for trivial statements such as, "it is snowing outside," while i don't have a well formed argument against it, i am somewhat uncomfortable with saying that it is true. however, for less trivial statements, such as "there is gravity," i think it is pretty easy to form an argument. the statement "there is gravity" can only be a summary for stating

"there is a large body of empirical observations that are all expected on the basis of positing the existence of some inexplicable force pulling all objects together. in particular, various physicists have concocted a precise formula that quantitatively characterizes this force for many cases."

i'm inclined to acknowledge that the first sentence is approximately true. however, the second sentence implies that the current model of gravity is imperfect, in that certain cases are not accurately characterized by even our best gravitational models. in that sense, the gravity that we posit to exist in correct, and so the statement "there is gravity" is also incorrect. furthermore, it is unlikely that we will ever have a comprehensive model of gravity, so the statement, "there is gravity" will never be strictly true.

mathematically, one could imagine that gravity is an "ill-posed problem", meaning there is no unique solution. thus, even if one could construct a comprehensive model of gravity, it would by no means by the only possible model; rather, it would be the only one we've thought of so far. aside from trivial changes in the model (like renaming something), in general, i see no reason to believe that all the observations relating to gravitational forces should only be explicable in a single way. therefore, there could be many equally good models of gravity. are they all correct? maybe. alternately, they may all be useful descriptions of the same phenomena. probably, some descriptions would be more useful than others (at the least, in some cases this should be true). in that case, we would prefer certain models at certain times. then, talking about whether a model is true becomes less important, and talking about whether it is useful is more important. so the question of truth vanishes in favor of the question of utility. i guess this makes me some what of a pragmatist.

this argument holds generally for any model of any feature(s) of the world. if one posits that all descriptions are really just linguistic models of the world, then the appropriate question to ask is which are useful. those models/descriptions that are useful are tho ones that should be kept and refined, others should be discarded. since we probably will never get a completely true model, i think this is the only reasonable desirate: utility.

furnishing the mind, by jesse prinz

jesse starts with the premise that concepts are essentially the constituents of our mental lives, and therefore, any satisfactory explanation of mentality should incorporate a satisfactory of concepts. to date, however, upon his estimation (and my own), no such account of concepts exists. he therefore sets up a list of desirata that an account of concepts should satisfy, including things like acquisition, publicity, intentionality, etc. then, he presents the current leading theories of concepts, providing both the positive and negative elements of each. he then combines the desirable features of each to develop a novel theory, called proxytype theory.

proxytype theory essentially posits that concepts are mechanisms of detection (used by minds) of statistical regularities in the world. they are "couched in representational codes that are specific to our perceptual systems," ie, the concept of G# is couched in our auditory system, whereas the concept BLUE is couched in our visual system. while i think this nicely accounts for any "perceptually available concept", which i loosely define here as concepts that not that concrete, it is harder to understand how such a theory could account for the concept JUSTICE. in which modality is such a concept stored?

that being said, i think he is on to something. brains seem to act largely as repositories of statistical regularities of the environment. their purpose is often considered to be twofold: (1) information processing, and (2) information storage. i argue that the feature that makes brains cool, and enables them to do such cool stuff that even the worlds most advanced computers aren't even close to (eg, laugh, recognize a face, etc.), is their incredible information storage capacity. in that sense, one could think of concepts as fuzzy blobs in neural activity space corresponding to some sort of environmental regularity. in other words, for any given concept C, there should be some pattern of neural activity A, corresponding to that concept. if one analyzed the neural activity of some subject S upon being presented with an object that has property C, assuming that S has concept C, then A should be present. furthermore, A should also be present in some other subject S2. something such as this must be true if both S and S2 share the concept C.

in light of that argument, of course modality specific concepts should evoke modality specific neural activities - there is no way to avoid this. this can also alleviate some of our fears about more abstract concepts, such as JUSTICE. some pattern of neural activity corresponds to that concept.

note that these patterns of neural activity need not be identical in each person. rather, some feature(s) of those patterns should be consistent for any instantiation of concept C, regardless of which person observes something with property C, and is "conscious" of observing C.

explaining the brain, by carl craver

craver's central hypothesis is that adequate explanations of how brain stuff is causally related to mental stuff are mechanistic in nature. apparently, philosophers have had some debate over similar issues in the past, and others have suggested other arguments (eg, the"covering law model" posits that "explanations explain...by showing that the phenomenon was to have been expected on the basis of the laws of nature". anyway, that explanations should incorporate mechanisms is fairly obvious to nearly all the good neuroscientists i know. this is clear upon reading any of their webpages, where they describe their research goals. for instance, the title of my thesis is something like, "inferring the neural mechanisms of..." (the ellipsis indicates that i think you don't care about the details). craver does however make a compelling argument to those people who haven't reached that conclusion just yet.

a central component of his argument is that these mechanisms must span multiple levels. for instance, if changes in neural circuitry are necessary for storing new information, then an adequate explanation should explain the relationship between spatiotemporal patterns of activity and synaptic plasticity, which are arguably different levels of explanation already. although this may again seem somewhat trivial, i think this is a valuable insight, even for those neuroscientists who agree about the mechanisms, as there is a significant "level-bias" in neuroscience research (ie, many investigators believe that explanations should lie at a particular level of description, eg, spatiotemporal patterns of spiking, versus across levels).

overall, i think he reaches a good conclusion, and makes a strong argument in support of it, so if you ask yourself, "what kind of explanations are adequate in (neuro)science" and your answer is not "mechanistic", i highly recommend this book. if, on the other hand, your answer is "mechanistic", it is somewhat less pertinent, but still an interesting read.