Denying behavior: throwing experience out.

Abstract

A recent paper (Skarda, 1986) from a distinguished laboratory of experimental neurophysiology denies the classical concept of neural representation. According to this essay, which is itself a critique of a basic neuroscientific assumption as implied in a new book about the mind-brain problem, it is wrong to suppose that patterns of neural activity represent anything. Representations should be replaced by "self-organizing neural processes that achieve a certain end-state of interaction between the organism and its environment in a flexible and adaptive manner." Although this alternative wording is neither surprising nor radical, and would prove acceptable to most biologists as an adequate description of one important aspect of organized cellular activity, its author's dogmatic denial of "representation" as a metaphor for other important aspects of living behavior seems both surprising and unnecessary.