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Modulation : an alternative to instructions and forces

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Abstract

It is widely believed that neural elements interact by communicating messages. Neurons, or groups of neurons, are supposed to send packages of data with informational content to other neurons or to the body. Thus, behavior is traditionally taken to consist in the execution of commands or instructions sent by the nervous system. As a consequence, neural elements and their organization are conceived as literally embodying and transmitting representations that other elements must in some way read and conform to. In opposition to this conception, growing approaches such as enactivism and ecological psychology hold that neurons are not in the business of representing. However, by insisting that neural causation is not of a representational kind, these anti-representationalist approaches seem to be left with only one rather implausible alternative, viz. that behavior is the result of nothing but basic physical causation such as push-pull forces. In this paper it is argued that a third form of causation—termed “modulation”—exists and is at work in the coordination of animal behavior. Modulation is the quasi-direct guidance of dynamical systems through specific yet emerging trajectories. By setting the constraints that coordinate the free interaction of multi-element systems, modulation influences without forcing nor representing goal states. The basic properties of modulatory causation are analyzed and shown to be present in some fundamental aspects of neural and bodily interaction.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., (Clark 2008; Pfeifer and Bongard 2006) for an extensive use of this notion.

  2. Fred Keijzer (2001, p. 117), used the notion of “modulation” to characterize Raibert and Hodgins’ notion of “suggestion”. This paper can be considered as an endeavor to render Keijzer’s insight more systematic.

  3. I thank an anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft for warning against the risk of this circularity.

  4. I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to Craver’s treatment of filler terms.

  5. More on the conditions for being a representation below.

  6. There is also the modular version of patchy representationalism where connectionist modules or “resources” are believed to co-exist with computational ones in the same network and the agent must choose which resource to use according to the task (Minsky 2006).

  7. I am assuming a processor manufacturing process that hasn’t yet reached the size of a single atom.

  8. An anonymous reviewer has expressed his or her concern for my choice of “structural isomorphism” as it seems to restrict too much the class of representational formats that my paper addresses. He or she suggests, instead, that I consider “functional” isomorphism instead of “structural”. I want to make clear that I completely agree with this. I do not mean by “structural” a “physical” isomorphism as that between a sculpture and its model. By using the term “structural” I am only referring to the fact that there must be a structure somewhere doing the representing, even if it is not the shape of this structure per se that bears the isomorphism and some additional process is needed, such as decoding, or translation from sentences into a matrix, etc. Clearly, whatever the format, the isomorphism must be functional ; but also, whatever the format, there must be a structure subserving it. That’s all I mean by “structural isomorphism”.

  9. To be sure, it does transmit its temperature, but this property is irrelevant in the sense that it doesn’t belong to the chosen explanandum, which is composed of the mentioned geometrical patterns.

  10. Other names have been attributed to the same kind of system, in particular, “synergy” is synonymous with “coordinative structure” and “dissipative structure” (Kugler et al. 1980).

  11. This is actually an oversimplification. Not even this relatively simple value is completely specified by the nervous system. As Turvey stresses, \(\lambda \), which constitutes a control parameter, is itself an abstract global value emerging from other parameters and factors at a lower level (Turvey 2007, p. 663)!

  12. I use the notion of “autonomy” here in its largest and weakest sense. A stronger notion, often employed by enactivists and ecological psychologists, would imply that synergies alone are autonomous. While it makes sense to distinguish enactive autonomy from representational autonomy, my focus here is on the difference between these two systems and mechanically driven systems that don’t fall under any concept of autonomous system.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Jan Degenaar, Fred Keijzer, Erik Myin, Michael Turvey and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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  1. SND, Paris Sorbonne University/ CNRS, 1, Rue Victor Cousin, 75005, Paris, France

    Martin Flament Fultot

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Flament Fultot, M. Modulation : an alternative to instructions and forces. Synthese 194, 887–916 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0976-x

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