The essential task of brain function is to construct orderly patterns of neural activity from disorderly sensory inputs, so that effective actions can be mounted by the brain, a finite state system, to deal with the world's infinite complexity. Two schools of thought are described, that characterize distinctive sources of the order within brains, one passive, the other active. These schools have profoundly influenced ways two groups of contemporary neuroscientists design their experiments and process their data, so that they have very different perspectives on the roles of noise and chaos in brain function.

Perception is an intentional action by which the finite brain explores the infinite world. By acting, the brain thrusts its body into the future spacetime of the world while predicting the sensory consequences. By perceiving its actions and their results, it remembers its predictions. To perform these operations the brain, through chaotic dynamics, constructs and uses finite perceptual matrices of space, time and causation. Perceived time differs from world time in ways that are determined by the neural mechanisms of intentionality. In particular, perception of the self in action, through the mechanism of preafference, gives structure and content to the concepts of contiguity, duration, temporal order, cause, and effect. Remembered time differs from perceived time in being dependent on awareness, which makes it episodic, fragmentary, and subject to large variations in rates of time lapse in the flow of meanings.

Perception is an intentional action through space in time by which the finite brain explores the infinite world. By acting, the brain thrusts its body into the future spacetime of the world while predicting the sensory consequences. Through perceiving its actions and their results, it remembers its predictions, its actions, and their consequences. To perform these operations the brain, through chaotic dynamics, constructs and uses finite perceptual matrices of spacetime and infers causation. Perceived time differs from world time in ways that are determined by the neural mechanisms of intentionality. In particular, perception of the self in action, through the mechanism of preafference, gives structure and content to the concepts of continuity, contiguity, duration, temporal order, cause, and effect. Perceptual scales are expanded beyond kinesthesia by conversion of time into space, such as by clocks and calendars. Remembered time differs from perceived time in being dependent on awareness, which makes it episodic, fragmentary, and subject to large variations in rates of time lapse in the flow of meanings. The attribution of causal agency to objects and events in the world results from anthropomorphization in accordance with the neural mechanisms of the internal perception of intentional action. Time and Causation 2 Walter J Freeman

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The aim of this tutorial is to document a novel approach to brain function, in which the key to understanding is the capacity of brains for self-organization. The property that distinguishes animals from plants is the capacity for directed movement through the environment, which requires an organ capable of organizing information about the environment and predicting the consequences of self-initiated actions. The operations of predicting, planning acting, detecting, and learning comprise the process of intentionality by which brains construct meaning. The currency of brains is primarily meaning and only secondarily information. The information processing metaphor has dominated neurocognitive research for half a century. Brains certainly process information for input and output. They pre-process sensory stimuli before constructing meaning, and they post-process cognitive read-out to control appropriate action and express meaning. Neurobiologists have thoroughly documented sensory information processing bottomup, and neuropsychologists have analyzed the later stages of cognition top-down, as they are expressed in behavior. However, a grasp of the intervening process of perception, in which meaning forms, requires detailed analysis and modeling of neural activity that is observed in brains during meaningful behavior of humans and other animals. Unlike computers, brains function

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Abstract This study explores young children’s ability to construct and explain adaptive behaviors of a behaving artifact, an autonomous mobile robot with sensors. A central component of the behavior construction environment is the RoboGan software that supports children’s construction of spatiotemporal events with an a-temporal rule structure. Six kindergarten children participated in the study, three girls and three boys. Activities and interviews were conducted individually along five sessions that included increasingly complex construction tasks. It was found that all of the children succeeded in constructing most such behaviors, debugging their constructions in a relatively small number of cycles. An adult’s assistance in noticing relevant features of the problem was necessary for the more complex tasks that involved four complementary rules. The spatial scaffolding afforded by the RoboGan interface was well used by the children, as they consistently used partial backtracking strategies to improve their constructions, and employed modular construction strategies in the more complex tasks. The children’s explanations following their construction usually capped at one rule, or two condition-action couples, one rule short of their final constructions. With respect to tasks that involved describing a demonstrated

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