*Hierarchy or Heterarchy? A Theory of Long-Range Connections for the
Sensorimotor Brain - Hawkins, et al*
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05888
Do heterarchies of turtles have tops and bottoms?
"what did the snail riding on the turtle's back say?"
"wheee!"
On 7/7/26 10:10 am, glen wrote:
Yeah, something like that, I guess. But the voting isn't as important
as the process that assembles/reduces the votes. So w.r.t. to doxastic
voluntarism, when I (a percolating stew of circuits, some small, some
large) accidentally burp out an action - like punching a Patriot Front
nazi in the throat - a very large feedback loop holds "me" (this
percolating stew) accountable. And then the prosecution and defense go
about teasing apart the process by which the burp came about (mens rea).
Mugg's mixing board set up seems to assume some kind of teleology I'm
not comfortable with. I don't *intend* to hate masked men in khaki
pants ... I just *do*. I can't help it. No amount of adjusting my
sliders in any purposeful way can change that. I'd have to embed with
them for a looooong time so that the sliders adjusted themselves.
Nazis are *grown* not *made*.
And then we have a bit of a vicious regress. When a small circuit
votes, does it also comprise a percolating stew of even smaller
circuits, whose votes are also processed? And if so, is there a larger
accountability circuit that has to tease apart its reduction process?
Is there a bottom turtle?
On 7/7/26 8:49 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
Maybe the small, fast, predictive processes "vote"?
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Research: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2>
On Tue, Jul 7, 2026, 8:35 AM glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Of course. You have a knack for pushing my buttons. 8^D
What irritates me about all this active inference and predictive
processing advocacy [⛧] is well-represented in the title of that
chapter "From Sensorimotor Skills to Higher Cognition". [grrrr] The
reason I took the time to download it and start skimming it was my
hope for a thorough *composition* from the very small-fast feedback
loops to the large-slow ones. There are a lot of citations. So maybe
the clues are in there. But I'm lazy.
What I *want* ... what I really really want is evidence of
predictive processing in a minimal model organism like C. Elegans or
Drosophilia. Such exist [1-5]! But now we need something like
connectome (or simpler?) circuits in more complex organisms that show
how small-fast predictive processing composes into large-slow
predictive processing. Does the model work at *all* scales? Only some
scales? Is it like a percolating stew of predictions, some of which
are suppressed by the larger circuits?
Speaking of which, I discovered this book just last night:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/from-human-reasoning-to-belief-an-empirical-account-joshua-mugg/de6c8394b4e24d99?ean=9781032736952
<https://bookshop.org/p/books/from-human-reasoning-to-belief-an-empirical-account-joshua-mugg/de6c8394b4e24d99?ean=9781032736952>
But as always, it's silly to keep buying books I'll never read. I
post it here in the hopes that you readers out there might read it
and tell me what it says ... or maybe I'll buy the epub and feed it
to Claude ... or maybe it's read it already? I haven't checked.
You'll remember we've had such arguments before, when you claimed I
*must* believe in the floor in order to get out of bed in the
morning. And my counter was that it is my *doubt* about the existence
of the floor that allows me to get out of bed. IDK if Mugg's "DJ
mixing board" model fits one of our stances better. But I do like it
better than the overly simplistic fast vs slow thinking model.
[1] Dimakou A, Pezzulo G, Zangrossi A, Corbetta M. The predictive
nature of spontaneous brain activity across scales and species.
Neuron. Published online March 1, 2025. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2025.02.009
[2] Kaplan H, Nichols A, Zimmer M. Sensorimotor integration in
Caenorhabditis elegans: a reappraisal towards dynamic and distributed
computations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences. 2018;373. doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0371
[3] Kim A, Fitzgerald J, Maimon G. Cellular evidence for
efference copy in Drosophila visuomotor processing. Nature
neuroscience. 2015;18:1247-1255. doi:10.1038/nn.4083
[4] Lin A, Witvliet D, Hernandez-Nunez L, Linderman S, Samuel A,
Venkatachalam V. Imaging whole-brain activity to understand behavior.
Nature reviews Physics. 2022;4:292-305. doi:10.1038/s42254-022-00430-w
[5] Wang S, Segev I, Borst A, Palmer S. Maximally efficient
prediction in the early fly visual system may support evasive flight
maneuvers. PLoS Computational Biology. 2019;17.
doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008965
[⛧] It seems to me that most of the peri-Friston work borders on
advocacy of the model(s) as opposed to challenging them. But I'm not
a scholar. So my scope is very small.
On 7/6/26 8:15 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> Hi, Glen,
>
> I liked the predictive processing thing. It coheres with an
idea I have been kicking around of late. People tend to think of
cognitive processes as putting us in touch with the world as it is.
Then we look at that represented world and make decisions about the
future. Wouldn't it make more sense for cognitive processes to put
us in touch with the world as it is going to be? To translate that
back into monist talk, we live in a world of successive
anticipations. As I get more frail, I become aware of all the hard
work my cerebellum must be doing to anticipate the consequences of
any action I might take that changes my center of gravity. A delayed
prediction can lead to my taking actions that compound a balance
prediction and send me to the floor. it's like I am doing judo to
myself.
>
> Is that annoying enough to feed the beast?
>
> Nick
>
> On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 6:31 PM glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote:
>
> It's so dead, here, I figure it can't hurt to post
arbitrary nonsense I've run across lately:
>
> Meningeal lymphatic architecture and drainage dynamics
surrounding the human middle meningeal artery
> https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113693
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113693>
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113693
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113693>>
>
> Constructing a lower-bound estimate of the global number
of insect species on a hyperdiverse empirical foundation
> https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2524283123
<https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2524283123>
<https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2524283123
<https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2524283123>>
>
> Predictive Processing: From Sensorimotor Skills to Higher
Cognition
> https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15999.003.0011
<https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15999.003.0011>
<https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15999.003.0011
<https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15999.003.0011>>
>
> As always, I'm reading them in fitful bursts, interleaved
across each other and all the other open tabs and crap strewn about
my desk. So .... grain of salt and all.
>
> --
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