A wonderful text by Michael Gromov: http://www.ihes.fr/~gromov/PDF/ergobrain.pdf
Posted by: Alexandre Borovik | December 20, 2009
Structures, Learning and Ergosystems
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Mathematics under the Microscope 
He has just updated the text (on 21 Dec).
Presumably the stories you collect are of interest to him; there seemed to be an explicit quote about something like this in the latest version but i cannot find it now, and dont quite remember what was it about.
By: o on December 23, 2009
at 12:46 pm
Gromov mentions something about the special role of the olfactory sense and “automorphism groups of Lebesgue-Rokhlin spaces” as involved symmetry group. This may be interesting in that context: “… another radical theory that Dr. Lynch has proposed, which is the idea that the olfactory cortex formed the template for the evolution of the cortex in mammals and primates. This intriguing theory brings a new perspective to the fact that the olfactory system has unique access to important brain systems including the frontal lobes, the amygdala (which is involve in emotion), and the hippocampus (which is essential to long-term memory).” So, comes the “ergobrain” from the olfactory system? What is the meaning of the later belonging to such a symmetry group? (And what are “Lebesgue-Rohklin spaces” and their automorph.-groups?)
By: Thomas on February 14, 2010
at 4:51 pm
This is interesting – thanks for giving the references.
I suspect, however, that the privileged access of the olfactory system to other brain systems excludes it from the list of suspects: mathematics is a hack.
By: Alexandre Borovik on February 16, 2010
at 9:41 am
Another thought – Gromov’s intentional neglection of “meaning” in his ergosystems makes me wonder if he gives the fascinating example of Ramanujan’s dealing with infinite series much weight. But is in contrast not most of mathematics about “patterns of meaning”?
Gromov relates concepts of “meaning” with “Egosystems”, and therefore inheriting the later’s incompatibility with “Ergosystems”. But one could equally try to trace “meaning” back to intuitive social competences, which probably developed much earlier than modern humans and human language. Such competences include a modeling of other hominid’s mentalities, i.e. something much more complex than everything else in their surrounding, and would naturally have lead to a “mysterious” mental surplus-capacity like that which Gromov gives as reason for suposing “Ergostructures”. E.g. the emergence of intuitive social competences seems to coincide with the hominid’s independence from specific ecological niches. I would associate “Egostructures” with language, i.e. something much later. If one takes this as extreme case for an “Egosystem”, one sees that it makes sense to view that as adaption to language-based large groups, but surely not earlier.
By: Thomas on February 17, 2010
at 11:09 am
A new book on child psychology: “Children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens,” writes Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby, a tour through the recent findings of cognitive science about the minds of young children. … Gopnik offers the captivating idea that children are more conscious than adults but also less unconscious, because they have fewer automatic behaviors… the child is a full partner, with a different brain than that of the adult, more capacious, with a greater plasticity, and a more highly attuned ability to drink in new information. The child is the auteur, the adult the producer. … Even infants are sensitive to statistical patterns. The learning of language in its earliest stages involves the statistical prediction of which sounds are most likely to follow one another—an unconscious exercise in probability theory. Gopnik argues that this ability to detect probability patterns extends beyond language—to musical tones in eight-month-olds, for instance—and isn’t limited to a specialized part of the brain as Noam Chomsky and others believe.”
By: Thomas on February 20, 2010
at 9:44 am
Wonderful!
By: Alexandre Borovik on February 22, 2010
at 7:18 am
MPG news on how the brain analyses sensoric input: “An important implication of this study is that visual perception depends on an active generation of predictions. This stands in contrast to the classical view that visual perception mainly results from a more passive cascade of responses to visual signals spreading through the brain”.
By: Thomas on March 12, 2010
at 7:07 am
News on general patterns on brain formation (german article)
By: Thomas on September 3, 2010
at 8:47 pm
Here is a fascinating new article of the New Scientist on “cell intelligence”, connecting nicely to the observation with which Gromov starts.
By: Thomas on April 28, 2010
at 6:42 am
It is intriguing indeed.
By: Alexandre Borovik on April 28, 2010
at 6:36 pm
On a related apparent ‘paradigm change’ in linguistics: “this view, the brain of a child does not arrive pre-programmed with abstract linguistic rules. Instead, its initial setting is much simpler: the first job of the brain is to build a more complicated brain. This it does using any input that it gets, including language. “
By: Thomas on June 2, 2010
at 2:06 pm
Here the link to Misha Gavrilovich ‘s thoughts on set theory, wich he relates to some of Gromov’s ideas.
By: Thomas on June 14, 2010
at 9:37 am