Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

They do if they are going to be imposed on experimentalists. Alternatively just each to their own. But their needs to be compromise for collaborations to progress. Definitions need to be useful.

But hold on, who said experimentalists have to establish representation? I am perfectly happy with neural correlates. Find them very interesting, too.

Wtf - why do you care what word I use if I am speaking in natural English? Are you just trying to make up for the fact that philosophers are using the wrong words again?

Now Tim, philosophers are literally paid to make problems out of non-problems by engaging in confusing language games... they're only doing their jobs, be nice.

There's a lot of subtle and useful philosophical work on representation that is worth a look.

A problem is construing this as a debate about "usage". It's not in the 1st instance. Was Shannon legislating usage when he defined "information"? He did serious formal work to tell us what information is. Once we accepted that, yes, usage is fixed, becomes technically useful.

Totally cool with formalising the word. Just don’t change it into something else (like causality), and don’t make definitions that make our lives harder (because they can’t be tested).

God, here I go violating my non-participation, but: Don't you think, Tim, that we assume causality, even if we can't demonstrate it? Don't we care about the activity patterns we observe because we assume the information they carry is being used downstream to guide behaviour?