How we fragment the world

The View From Inside Versus the View From Outside

Bibliographic Data

ID3102240
AuthorsYuri I Alexandrov (V. B. Shvyrokov Laboratory of Neural Bases of Mind, Institute of Psychology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Yaroslavskaya St 13, 129366 Moscow, Russia, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume47
Issue3
Pages419-457
Publication date2008-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Science Information (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0539-0184 • E-ISSN: 1461-7412
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0539018408092580
OpenAlexW2134198050
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited54

To construct an environment consisting of artificial objects it is helpful to use descriptions of how individuals behave. Implicitly, we do this on the basis that outward behavior reflects the dynamics of the subjective world and is a deployment of brain processes. But this is only partly correct: outwardly `similar' behavioral acts or environmental patterns may correspond to very different neural activities (the view `from inside' the subject). This is because behavior is the result of the history of behavioral development, such that the brain organizations that correspond to an `object' are the ones that were constructed during the subject's past experience in the course of performing related activity. As the construction of brain organizations takes place in the context of a goal-oriented activity, the very nature of the neural organizations involved stays connected to this goal. Empirically, the goal aspect of the object seems more structuring than the pattern of the object itself. This article compares the view from outside and the view from inside for different kinds of specific experimental situations. We show that `externally' similar objects may correspond to very different brain activations. Alternatively, behaviors and environmental events that seem different to an external observer may actually appear similar when viewed from inside the agent's brain. Experimental findings suggest that what is stable in an `object' for a living organism is its subjective status: at the neural level, meaning for the agent is more important than `objective' form. We also show that the nature of objects as seen from the inside depends on the way they were constructed through the organism's experience: behaviors or objects that may look similar from the outside are in this respect also different from the inside perspective. This has implications for the way we should construct objects in the digital world: building by mimicking the appearance of the physical world as seen from the outside may result in poor design

Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Political science · Structuring · Action Observation and Synchronization · Computer Science · History · Memory and Neural Mechanisms · Neural dynamics and brain function · Psychology · Social Psychology · Artificial Intelligence

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