Understanding the Brain p. 8 Josephson
nodes of syntactic structures. Such a mechanism could arise if a pre-existing system assigning types to
elementary signs became allied with the system concerned with conceptual units. As is well known,
grammatical types do not necessarily correlate with semantic categories, so we may infer that evolution (though
possibly the evolution of languages rather than biological evolution) found it more useful to work with a model
where the inherited types had the role of conventional markers rather than indicators of meaning, which can be
indicated in other ways.
Now a comment on what is special about human use of language. As far as we know, the content of human
discourse is special in that it is not tied to the immediate situation. This we can interpret as a development
from an enhanced ability to recall past events, stabilised by applying linguistic processes to the recollections
and integrating them into plans. The use of language to make present events that are not present appears to
depend both on the neural mechanisms underpinning the processes indicated and a cultural practice of applying
linguistic capacities in such a way.
This section will close with a general perspective on language. We can think of a language system as having
power, in the same kind of way that an axiom system has power related to what can be proved within that
system. There may well be no general theorems as to what language can do; rather, users constantly improve
language by discovering ways to minimise confusion and ambiguity, extending the usages of existing
vocabulary and creating new vocabulary where necessary. Users also discover where the limits of using their
languages lie and keep within these limits, shaping existence so that language remains an ever-ready tool.
The above discussion of language has been very speculative, and is intended mainly as an indication of how the
present approach, with its emphasis on specific abstractions, and systems that make use of these abstractions,
can be applied. Systems whose design follows these principles are already attuned to a range of natural
regularities, some actual and some possible by means of creative processes, and can develop rapidly in the
corresponding directions.
10. Conclusions
The above is not a theory of the brain, but rather a framework upon which, it is proposed, theories to address
specific issues can be built. The framework is of a very abstract character, involving a number of ideas rather
unfamiliar in the field. However, the validity of each individual concept, e.g. observational emergence or
representational redescription, argues for the validity the scheme as a whole, though this does not in itself prove
that the ideas apply to the actual nervous system. What the scheme can do is help to impose a clear structure on
a very unclear problem, in the same sort of way that concepts such as molecules, binding sites, chemical
reactions, catalysis and so on impose a structure for the understanding of the processes of the organism. What
can be demonstrated on a purely qualitative basis as in the present paper is limited, and it is to be hoped that
those equipped to do so will apply these concepts to begin the task of structuring the complexity of the nervous
system and its functions in a more rigorous manner than has been possible in the present work.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Prof. Nils Baas for discussions of the hyperstructure concept, which plays an important role in
the above thinking.