What does it mean to represent? Mental representations as falsifiable memory patterns
This addresses a foundational conceptual issue for researchers in neuroscience and AI, though it is incremental as it builds on existing philosophical debates.
The paper tackles the philosophical problem of defining representation in neuroscience and AI by proposing that representations correspond to inferred latent structures with objective properties, illustrated through a simple neural network simulation.
Representation is a key notion in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI). However, a longstanding philosophical debate highlights that specifying what counts as representation is trickier than it seems. With this brief opinion paper we would like to bring the philosophical problem of representation into attention and provide an implementable solution. We note that causal and teleological approaches often assumed by neuroscientists and engineers fail to provide a satisfactory account of representation. We sketch an alternative according to which representations correspond to inferred latent structures in the world, identified on the basis of conditional patterns of activation. These structures are assumed to have certain properties objectively, which allows for planning, prediction, and detection of unexpected events. We illustrate our proposal with the simulation of a simple neural network model. We believe this stronger notion of representation could inform future research in neuroscience and AI.