Re: Thanks

i think you need a top down as well as bottom up. as looking at my piano while being played, i can go string by string ( not string theory strings). hammer by hammer, material of string , molecular interaction naturalvibration, harmonics, sympathtice vibration but i would not hear or understand the melody or music being played. I believe that each individual has its own encrpytion algorithm, as the neural net grows it encrypts some input signals. some are hard wired. so instead of emotion , movement, speech, etc, I think a profitable area of initail inquiry should be the hard wired aversive stuff only. smell of dead meat. . reaction to fire. i tihnk that aesthetics will be the greatest ration of output to input. or the least energy to decode. dissonance, cannot be easily resolved so the energy to decode the information, is too high and becomes painful. Does a dream state come upon us, or do we dream all the time and concious state relegates the dreams to behind the screen. When sleep deprived the dreams begin to pop through the screen, as hallucinations. a breakdown of the screen , results in a form of schizophrenia, where they cann no longer distiguish between voices. dream produced while awake or the awake state angel on the shoulder whispering. I am an avid funder of the bleeding edge in many fields. keep me up to date on what you are doing, and hope to see you in your own habitat.

I agree we need a top-down! Two thoughts:
-- Yes, developing mapping circuit technology and then applying it
to simple behaviors -- hard wired aversive stuff -- is indeed a way
to go. As we plan out these mapping technologies, we're actually
beginning experiments to map out these aversive things too. We are
collaborating with many groups along these lines. We need to finish
the fundamental technology building so that we can obtain maps at the
right level, and then we can acquire datasets that are compatible
with top-down theory, to be sure.
-- Another way to think top-down is to work our way inwards, from
the observables. We know that behavior -- movement, speech, other
action
-- is observable; if a feeling or thought is prominent enough, it
will be manifest through these channels as an observable. Thus we
can also try to infer internal states by their effects on
observables, and then to associate neural activity with these
internal states and observables. In theory this should scale to arbitrarily complex internal states, not just simple aversive states.

Best,
Ed

give me a piano music analogy, / watching the strings, ? after key
inputs,? interesting byt not dispositive of anything meaningful

The piano itself isn't quite the analogy to the brain, because it has no memory, independent of the human playing it. After the finger lifts, the strings quiets down.

So I am assuming that we need to model the human playing the piano?

Suppose, say, we want to understand what emotion is generating the music.

If we could measure activity in the brain of the person playing the piano, and could predict what melody or sequence of notes the person would play, based on that activity, then we could infer that the internal brain activity was causing the melody. This inference might be convertible into proof, if we were to stimulate the brain and play back an activity pattern into the brain, seeing how that would alter the melody being played. And if we have a molecular map of the brain, which we could simulate on a computer, we could through biophysical simulation begin to see how the molecular interactions between cells, yield dynamics of the network, which then yield the sequence of finger commands that yield the music.

Thus, the finger is the interface between two dynamical systems -- the brain and the piano. Each of those dynamical systems has a physical implementation that can be modeled, if we have three things:

-- mechanistic maps (piano: string lengths, material properties, etc.)

-- dynamics (piano: the finger movements and temporal scuplting)

-- control (piano: we can modulate the human and see how the music changes)

Ed