Mental Recognition of Objects via Ramsey Sentences

How does the Human Brain Recognize Dog?

Abstract

Dogs display vast phenotypic diversity, including differences in height, skull shape, tail, etc.  Yet, humans are almost always able to quickly recognize a dog, despite no single feature or group of features are critical to distinguish dogs from other objects/animals.  In search of the mental activities leading human individuals to state “I see a dog”, we hypothesize that the brain might extract meaningful information from the environment using Ramsey sentences-like procedures.  To turn the proposition “I see a dog” in a Ramsey sentence, the term dog must be replaced by a long and complex assertion consisting only of observational terms, existential quantifiers and operational rules.  The Ramsey sentence for “I see a dog” sounds: “There is at least an entity called dog which satisfies the following conditions: it is an animal, it has four legs, …, etc, …, and is something that I have in my sight”.  We discuss the biological plausibility and the putative neural correlates of a Ramsey-like mechanism in the central nervous system.  We accomplish a brain-inspired, theoretical neural architecture consisting of a parallel network that requires virtually no memory, is devoid of probabilistic choices and can analyze huge but finite amounts of unique visual details, combining them into a single conceptual output.  In sum, Ramsey sentence stands for a versatile tool that can be used not just as a methodological device to cope with biophysical affairs, but also for a model to describe the real functioning of cognitive operations such as sensation and perception.