The recursively generational brain

Abstract

Modern understandings of the brain involve computation in one form or another. In large brain projects the synthesis of brain and computer is taken to its ultimate conclusion by super computer simulations of the brain and the export of brain processes in the form of neuromorphic computing. But behind these computations lurks the reality of a brain calling upon itself in the representation of itself, with each call establishing a new generation of itself. This is a recursively generational brain, a brain that is both generating and generated. This article conceptualises these processes in terms of the relational symmetries of the generating brain and the generated brain. Abstract constructs are made more tangible in an example in which geometric characteristics of a triangle are used to model the functioning of a simplified recursively generational brain. In conclusion, it is claimed that a proper simulation of the brain would necessarily be cyborgian.

The generational brain: Introduction

“…For psychology, he argues, instead of conflating persons with brains we should understand the brain and its subdivisions as tools for psychological functions. Articulating a different argument, Vasi van Deventer (2016) tackles science’s perennial promise of mastery, indicating that neuroscience’s ambitions will necessarily have to be more modest given the process and possibility of self-representation. This has implications for ambitious and expensive projects such as the Human Brain Project, but importantly does not mean that neuroscience is rendered impossible but rather that the limits of what it can claim are necessarily more moderate.…”