Seeing red

[bennyboy]

Okay, let's revise the word "cause" to "is." Let's say that the brain, as a whole, coordinates input from various sources and collates them into an overall representation. So when you say "isomorphic," you mean that the representation in the brain mirrors, at least approximately, the world as the organism (or robot or whatever) experiences it, constrained by the physical limits of the organism to collect information about the world.

My question is still about levels. What states are representative, and which are just states? It's hard to verbalize what I'm asking here, but let me try an analogy. Let's say we are making a physical reprentation, i.e. a model, of the world. We could start by building little trees, little cars, etc., each of those in turn composed of leaves or wheels, each of those composed of subparts. We would know also that each subpart consisted of chemicals with specific structures, atoms with specific structures, etc. Some of those (like the QM mechanics) we might be completely oblivious to. At which level of organization do we start to accept that we are building part of a tree? Only when we have the finished model? Only when we have identifiable parts, like leaves and branches? Right from the start, since we know the chemical compounds we are making are part of that final tree, despite having nothing of tree-ness in them?

Let me ask you this: would you say that our mental representation is composed of parts, and those of subparts? If so, how many child nodes would you allow and still call an idea part of that representation? At what scale of order would you say, "That's just stuff" ?