Abstract
The central issue of cognitive science is how a large collection of coupled neurons does not limit to automatic responses to environmental inputs, as done by brainless lower animals, but combines external data with internal memories into new coherent patterns of meaning. Based on recent laboratory investigations of homoclinic chaotic systems, and how they mutually synchronize by weak coupling,a novel conjecture on the dynamics of the single neuron is formulated. Homoclinic chaos appears as the easiest way to code information in time by a code consisting of trains of equal spikes occurring at erratic times; synchronization of trains of different individual neurons is the basis od a coherent perception. The percept space P can be given a metric structure by introducing a distance measure. The distance in P space is conjugate to the duration time in the sense that a quantum uncertainy relation in percept space is associated with time limited perceptions.
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Arecchi, F.T. (2003). Complexity and Emergence of Meaning: The Fundamental Level of Neurophysics. In: Benci, V., Cerrai, P., Freguglia, P., Israel, G., Pellegrini, C. (eds) Determinism, Holism, and Complexity. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4947-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4947-2_1
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