The Circular Causation in Control Systems

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Henry and I discuss why he thinks neuroscience is in a crisis (in the Thomas Kuhn sense of scientific paradigms, crises, and revolutions). Henry thinks our current concept of the brain as an input-output device, with cognition in the middle, is mistaken. He points to the failure of neuroscience to successfully explain behavior despite decades of research. Instead, Henry proposes the brain is one big hierarchical set of control loops, trying to control their output with respect to internally generated reference signals. He was inspired by control theory, but points out that most control theory for biology is flawed by not recognizing that the reference signals are internally generated. Instead, most control theory approaches, and neuroscience research in general, assume the reference signals are what gets externally supplied... by the experimenter.

• Yin lab at Duke.
• Twitter: @HenryYin19.
• Related papers
  • The Crisis in Neuroscience.
  • Restoring Purpose in Behavior.
  • Achieving natural behavior in a robot using neurally inspired hierarchical perceptual control.

0:00 - Intro 5:40 - Kuhnian crises 9:32 - Control theory and cybernetics 17:23 - How much of brain is control system? 20:33 - Higher order control representation 23:18 - Prediction and control theory 27:36 - The way forward 31:52 - Compatibility with mental representation 38:29 - Teleology 45:53 - The right number of subjects 51:30 - Continuous measurement 57:06 - Artificial intelligence and control theory