Sunday, April 12, 2009

Gerald M. Edelman:
If our scientific description of the world is concerned with nature, our creativity reflects the ability of our brain to give rise to a second nature.(p.100)

...no information is provided on that which is to be recognized. So if instruction is precluded and yet recognition of a wide variety of states is required, the price paid is a certain loss of specificity. That loss, for example, as ambiguity or indeterminacy in language, is the price that must be paid if the range of signals to be responded to is large. We know, in fact, that the econiche in which animals must survive has an enormous number of signals to which an individual must adapt. For individuals and species to survive, a trade-off must be made between specificity and range (p. 101-2).

Source: G.M.Edelman. Second nature: brain science and human knowledge. Yale University Press. 2006.

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