Talk:Binding problem

Older comments
What about brain areas that are implicated in binding (e.g. parietal lobe and attention, the role of acetylcholene in feature binding)? Also, there are hypotheses about mechanisms of binding such as synchronous activity. what's the role of the hippocampus in binding? what about computational modeling of the binding problem. what about hebb rules (things that fire together wire together). etc etc etc. all of this should be added to the definition somewhere. Josh Susskind 21:25, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

What about a discussion of whether there even is a 'binding problem'? Many commentators feel that the very 'problem' is poorly posed. There are two separate issues which need to be addressed, phenomenal binding and functional binding, and it is misleading to confound the two as this article appears to. Some commentators argue that phenomenal binding is a conceptual confusion, this debate is important and should be raised here. The possible 'solutions' described in this article are more pertinent to functional binding.

Mechanisms such as synchronous activity or other objective correlates (neuro-transmitters etc.) have fallen out of favour as having any truly explanatory merit. They were all the rage some years ago especially when Crick and Koch had their 40 hz theory - but it proved a hollow argument - to paraphrase what one philospher said - 'just because a neuron over there is oscillating with the same frequency as one over here says nothing about how they represent features of the same object.' --hughey (talk) 08:58, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Oh and of course commentators such as Dennett feel the problem is poorly posed, as they have no answer to it and its very existence challenges their bankrupt behaviourist agenda. But shouting it down will not make it go away. There is an internal virtual reality generated by, or rather associated with, spatially disjoint regions of the brain. This is the non-local binding problem. Those who are in denial are only fooling themselves. --hughey (talk) 09:43, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

""What about a discussion of whether there even is a 'binding problem'? "", yeah, this is desperately needed. This article is very presumptive.

My b/g is mol. bio and biotech, currently working in neuroscience with a couple of 'pure' neuroscientists. So forgive me if this sounds 'reductionist', it's meant to be more mechanical an argument. The binding problem says that when you perceive an object, there must be some way for the yellowness of the duck be 'bound' to the shape of the duck. However, if we follow the (actual, biological neurological) chain from visual cortex through object recognition, edge detection and all those perceptual mechanisms, the data is always in local topographic register. And that map is hardwired in the superior colliculus for which gaze direction corresponds to which point in space. It actually makes a lot of sense because then you have an analogue computer computing on data directly linked to the point in space it appears to come from. A registered, arrayed connection all the way from the "real image" projected onto the retina to the "reductionist" point in the brain where consciousness is generated/priors registered or whatever, simultaneously activating tons of neural nets to produce (also topographically correctly registered) maps of meaning/objects/persons etc.

If the data is always cohesive in (cellular-connective, computationally adjacent and registered environmental) space, then the yellowness and shape of the duck are always locally bound. That seems to be the actual case in the brain, so why is there a controversy about the binding problem? Is it more of a philosophical thought experiment?

Biotech9 (talk) 13:36, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Explanations
This article needs a lot of expansion and explanation. For example, the current paragraph which deals with a homunculus being required for the TV viewing, and the alternative to the ghost in the machine answer with infinite regress. These things are not explained at all. 172.202.186.87 (talk) 07:08, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

New paragraph, moved from article for discussion
The following paragraph was added today by -- I am moving it here because it has several problems that I don't think can be fixed by simple copy-editing; let's discuss, please.


 * However, Dennett's view is by no means universally accepted. As Sutherland pointed out in the Journal of Consciousness Studies,, "One's own experience, which is perhaps the only starting point, seems to be centred around a phenomenal experiencer. But if you look inside the brain you can't find any little green men and this has given rise to a fear of homunculi, agents and Cartesian theatres. All this has resulted in some desperate and flawed attempts to build a bottom-up theory." Sutherland denotes the fear of the Homunculus as 'homuphobia'. He also slates Thomas Metzinger for attempting to ignore the inner experience, as he lamely agues against the homunculus: "Sorry Thomas, the cat's out of the bag -- the magician has pulled the rabbit out of his hat. Just like the behaviourists with their "fractional antedating goal responses" (article Rosch, 1994), the agent has crept back into the system just like he always will."  Another philosopher, Colin McGinn, describes clearly how our experience of the "outside world" is in fact nothing more than experience of an inner virtual reality of subjective dimensions .

Here are the main problems that I see:
 * 1) The paragraph seems basically to be arguing for straight-up dualism, but does so obscurely. It seems pretty obvious that there is no binding problem if you start by presupposing dualism.
 * 2) Everything after "Sutherland denotes..." looks like mere provocation as opposed to rational argument.

Regards, Looie496 (talk) 16:31, 8 December 2009 (UTC)


 * 1) The paragraph was introduced in order to bring some balance into a very lopsided version. Notably, Dennett is quoted, showing a clear bias toward eliminativism and out-dated behaviourism. The Tucson conferences have long since made clear that this one-sided agenda smuggled into all levels of the brain sciences by the behaviourists is no longer tenable. To disallow every argument against the eliminativist POV here on grounds that anything that opposes it must be dualist is specious in the extreme. Wikipedia is not your private stomping ground and so POV must be balanced.
 * 2) The "Sutherland denotes" seems to me a well reasoned philosophical stance. It is the Dennet stuff and everything in the last paragraph of hte previous version from "here is a basic logical impossibility" that is simply provocation and a rant in favour of eliminativism, which is NOT the default world-view.

Regards, --hughey (talk) 10:21, 9 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah! If your problem is with the preceding paragraph, I completely agree with you.  It says a bunch of things that I think are wrong, and doesn't give any sources -- if you feel that getting rid of that paragraph would help, I would be happy to go along with that.  We might then be able to have a better discussion of whether the material you added is still necessary. Regards, Looie496 (talk) 16:34, 9 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Been too busy to come back on this. When I have a bit of time round Xmas I will attempt a complete re-write of this section, incorporating elements of the present POV biased to eliminativism as it now stands and my proposed alteration above. --hughey (talk) 17:54, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * There is a need to split the article into one dealing with the neuroscience problem and a separate one for the philosophical one. It is a little odd that the article is called Binding problem but the lead opens by discussing the existence of two problems (practical and fundamental) -- and there are two sections related to them (practical and combinational). Though the neuroscience may clarify the philosophical one, it is independent of it. Moreover it seems a major issue for the latter (and above hence this comment) is how far progress in the former might or might be relevant to it.--LittleHow (talk) 17:43, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay Looie - that sounds fair. I also thought it too top-heavy with neuroscience findings, which are only a small part of the story. The philosophical aspect should be given proper treatment and is far, far more important in my view. And by serious I mean as well reducing the attention given to Dennett as if he was the sole arbiter. In fact, he is is a die-hard behaviourist and of limited interest in any real, balanced discussion of this issue. --hughey (talk) 18:15, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

I am puzzled by the discussion above. I believe it was I who introduced the references to Dennett. However, these do not involve his epiphenomenal views. The comment about homunculi is as I understand it a caveat made by Dennett admitting that the homunculus concept does not entail a regress, as is often suggested, and thereby giving ground to his opponents. There was no absolutely intention to support Dennett's eliminitavism, which appears to be irrelevant to the subject in hand - rather as has been pointed out. For this reason I find the new references to eliminativism to be non sequitur to the rest of the text and likely to confuse readers.

The other point I would make is that since this is an encyclopaedia the main objective would seem to be to give people with little or no knowledge of the meaning of a term a flavour of the scope of the term and in particular whether or not it is clearly defined or as so often, muddled. Pointing out that a term has two meanings would seem to be a crucial introduction to a useful account. In this case there is clearly serious muddling of two ideas. However, I do not think that they should just be separated because muddling of the two almost certainly reflects problems in formulation of questions involved in both. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lady Cairns (talk • contribs) 18:40, 21 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I have to admit that I am puzzled by all of this from beginning to end. I couldn't understand what you wrote back in 2008, and I don't understand what you wrote above.  I also don't understand what Dennett's views about homunculi (which I do understand, I think) have to do with the binding problem.  One issue is that the material you wrote in 2008 didn't cite any sources except Crick, so I couldn't tell whether you were trying to convey the views of notable philosophers, or expressing your own opinion. Looie496 (talk) 19:44, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Dear Looie, Firstly, apologies for not signing, which was due to my unfamiliarity with the system. Secondly, thanks for the comments so quickly. Thirdly, I am interested in trying to resolve what may be quite a difficult problem here. The fact that you did not understand what I wrote is of concern but not unexpected. I would like to add a few comments. I would also like to take some time trying to make an offer of a reasonable job of this entry, with feedback, bringing in a good survey of the literature. I have some time to do that and it seems a worthwhile project.

Although I chose Lady Cairns as nom de plume I have no problem clarifying who I am. I am an emeritus professor of medicine (male) at University College London who trained in basic neuroscience in Cambridge in the immediate post Hodgkin-Huxley era and in clinical neurology in London, both as part of general medical training. I spent my working life in immunology (away from neuroscience) but have recently returned to fundamental neurobiological issues.

What may be relevant is that most highly intelligent (and medically qualified) people I know and love cannot understand the binding problem and readily admit it. It seems a bit like being able to sight read a Mahler symphony score (for me totally off limits)- one of those things that most human minds simply cannot deal with. So we are in tiger country here. Then there are people who talk about the binding problem but in a way that suggests that they are unaware that they are conflating two related but quite distinct problems. Crick is one example. Gerald Edelman may be an even better example and would be worth citing because one can follow quite closely in his published work how he seems to use a solution to one problem to offer a solution to the other (in a way that may generate a contradiction).

My original comments along these lines were based on extensive discussion with the consciousness studies community and reading of the recent literature, as well as Descartes, Leibniz, James etc. I appreciate that citations can reasonably be expected here and now that I have time to look at this carefully I would like to try to do that. Valerie Hardcastle (Professor of Philosophy and an established figure in the field) is probably a good, sensible and well informed starting point. Sutherland is insightful and relevant. Metzinger is also relevant and the debate featured on JCS/Imprint is a good place for people to see the diversity of opinion. Historically, Descartes is probably the key figure and may be badly misread and underrated. Leibniz may be the most insightful of all on indivisibility and binding but perhaps because hubris got the better of him in tenet 80 of the Monadology is almost entirely misread except by a few fundamental physicists. James is crucial to the historical genealogy and his chapter 6 of POP is well written but he says nothing more than Descartes and famously bottles out later. A number of contemporary philosophers have contributions to make (I have recently completed a masters course in philosophy to get up to speed on these) including W Seager, G Strawson and CB Martin. Dennett's position I find tricky, in the sense that he seems to deny the need for an experiential binding ('combination') problem since he seems to deny the need for an internal subject whether or not homunculoid. Yet his multiple drafts seem to let subjects in by the back door. Ironically, this might turn out to be his best insight. My only reason for including comments on homunculi was in fact the presence of a reference to homunculi in the pre-existing draft item. As it stands it may be simply confusing, but on the other hand the original comment that the binding problem is related to the homunculus concept is valid. Epiphenomenalism is a can of worms that I think is best kept out of this piece.

I do have my own opinion and it will flavour what I write whether I like it or not, but I tried to play it down in the text as it stands, which can be based entirely on the views of others, and I have no particular desire to give it higher profile because what matters here is the extreme difficulty of the problem itself. I would be very happy to see a better solution than mine. I will do some more homework and hopefully will be able to offer something more than the starter we have. If I know that there are moderators out there who want to understand, guide and improve, all the better.

Yours respectfully Lady Cairns — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.197.217 (talk) 21:14, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Hello, and let me step in with a few comments. First of all, I want to say welcome to Wikipedia! It's always especially good to have editors here who are also experts in the subject matter. Perhaps you may also be interested in WP:WikiProject Neuroscience, in which both Looie and I are very active. I'd also like to draw your attention to some things about Wikipedia that occur to me after reading your comment above. There are some aspects of how the project works, with respect to subject matter experts, that can be counterintuitive at first. When you have a few minutes, please take a look at WP:NOR. I think that will give you some sense of the right ways and wrong ways to make use of one's expertise here. If you have any questions, I'd be delighted to answer them. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:57, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Dear Looie and Tryptofish, After a gap I returned to trying to generate a reasonably polished account for this topic. As it stands I have 3,000 words and 38 references, including a useful 2013 review of the synchrony story. I have looked at the guidelines and tried to follow these as best I can. I have stuck to the existing structure but expanded to try to do justice to neurobiological, computational and philosophy of mind issues. I think the topic should remain as a single entry for reasons covered by Revonsuo. Essentially, there are several overlapping issues that can be considered in different ways and it is important to note that the historical literature often tries to cover more than one of these issues without necessarily making it clear that they are different. My personal view will inevitably have flavoured my account in such a contentious area but my recent reading of reviews seems to suggest that most people agree on the key questions, if not the answers. A 1999 review by Shadlen and Movshon seems to be widely seen as providing a strong case for questioning the need for a special 'binding' problem in computational terms, and in particular the value of invoking synchronous activity. Merker 2013 adds other useful arguments. On the phenomenal 'combination' side the key issue seems to be whether the apparent unification of experience reflects convergence of causal pathways or can be dealt with in distributed functional terms. Both approaches generate serious problems for basic intuitions about what must be going on, but of very different sorts. Merker has generated an interesting argument that seems to spotlight the continuing difficulty of the choice as usually presented.

I will need at least another week to go over what I have but otherwise I would be ready to upload to the page. Should I go ahead with this or is there another route? (Lady Cairns (talk) 16:22, 18 February 2013 (UTC))Lady Cairns 18.2.2013.

Considering the Brain as a 3D Antenna
In The Practical Segregation Problem section above, binding the coherence of neural processes to conscious awareness is considered to occur at one moment of coherence. When we consider how wireless information tranfer works, it is much more likely that the coherenece is an act of clairity and that the information is transmitted from the brain to conscious awareness over a period of time, just as wireless communication is.

The major difference between considering the rbain as an antenna and present day wireless communication technology is that the brain is a 3D antenna that interfaces with a field of conscious awareness, rather than an electromagnetic field.

Evidence of a field of conscious awareness or to put more simply consciousness is found in studies of energy healing, meditation, the human aura and its chakras and acupuncture meridians.

I will provide these references from a book I have written upon request. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.64.72.249 (talk) 16:29, 18 October 2011 (UTC)
 * WP:NOR, WP:COI, WP:UNDUE, WP:FRINGE. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:41, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Recent research
The recent research of Singer, Melloni etc should be covered and referenced. Datafile28 (talk) 20:15, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Focus of the article and lead
(Moved from Lova Falk's talk page into this page)

Thank you for your work on that article. In your edit comments you have been asking for help. In my opinion, a general problem about the article is that is focusses a particular distinction, but at the same time a useful definition is lacking. 1. The word "term" in the first sentence should be lost. 2. I cannot quite see if there really are two meanings of the term. My impression rather is that in some specific context two aspects of the problem are distinguished. 3. In particular, the wording of the first sentence has been conceived with reference to two articles (Revonsue and Smythies). In the current version, that reference is gone. In consequence, it seems that the two problems that are discussed in the lead are representative of the binding problem, but I would not quite assume this to be the case. 4. The lost references are tragic for claims as "The segregation problem is sometimes called BP1" and "The combination problem is sometimes called BP2" since those derive mainly from a juxtaposition of the two articles. 5. Roughly, I doubt that there ever was a binding problem in the sense of a combination problem. There might be research that connects ideas about the binding problem with particular other ideas or problems in philosophy (e.g., the relation between the unity of self-conscousness and the synthesis of the transcendental apperception). Still, I think that the article should focus the binding problem.

I don't think that the lead should be structured in a way to comply with the two articles (and by that, the rest of the article). Rather, a decent, general lead with some more references would seem sensible to me. Still, as you have put so much work into it already without making these changes, maybe you think that the current structure should be kept? If you agree with me, I could help out.

Kindly, 㓟 (talk) 13:58, 19 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi 㓟, and thank you for your comments! I found the previous version of the lead difficult to understand, and tried to make it clearer. But I don't have access to sources as Revuonso and Smythies. I was rather doubtful about adding "The segregation problem is sometimes called BP1" and "The combination problem is sometimes called BP2" because when googling this line: "binding problem" "BP1" "BP2", I only got 75 hits. But I thought, let's have it in case some reader wants to know what is meant with BP1. When you say these lines derive mainly from a juxtaposition of the two articles, I wonder if these sentences constitute original research. (In that case, they absolutely should be removed.)
 * As for your other comments, please feel free to go ahead and edit! Kind regards,  Lova Falk     talk   05:51, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Dear Lova Falk, thank you very much. You can find the article by Revonsuo here: http://www.hedweb.com/intelligence-explosion/binding.pdf – the Smythies ref is a book, so without a page number it is another problem (I don't have that book either). In my comment, I was generally referring to the article before your edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Binding_problem&oldid=543501420 – just taking the first paragraph tells me that this is encyclopaedic writing resp. original research (the editor decided to speak of a "correspondence" of two sources without naming a third source that establishes that correspondence (refs 2 and 3 are earlier texts than 1 so they could not possibly say anything about a correspondence)). Still, I don't see the main problem in this being OR, but in a narrow and badly-written lead. However, in combination with pushing the focus on some correspondence between the refs clearly is OR, so I think it should be removed (again, my rationale is simply that old revision).

To reiterate, the lead might just be rewritten without that narrow focus on two authors that are not really important for establishing a first understanding of the problem. I am going to post some references for that. I think that we should first become clear about what the binding problem actually is, and then we might easily rescue that article.

Kindly, 㓟 (talk) 09:42, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

So here is some literature: User:㓟/Binding problem. Regards, 㓟 (talk) 10:49, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

After some more thought and another look at old revisions, my impression is this: this article was about the binding problem and about something called the combination problem. The latter is mainly discussed in philosophy of mind and in relation to pansychism. Chalmers, Seager and others indeed refer to a passage by William James, but it is not obvious that James coined the term "combination problem". If this article here should be about the binding problem, it should not be reduced to some kind of "segregation problem", and the deliberations about the combination problem should be deleted, put somewhere else, or at least condensed into a short section on the history of the problem (then, sources have to be be found which explicitly relate the binding problem to the combination problem). 㓟 (talk) 11:19, 20 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm going to complicate things yet more by pointing out that there is another well-known binding problem. When linguists talk about the "binding problem", they mean the problem of linking the words in a sentence to their grammatical and functional roles.  This has perhaps a loose relationship to the binding problem in perception but isn't the same thing.  Ray Jackendoff in particular has discussed the linguistic binding problem in depth. Looie496 (talk) 16:25, 20 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm out of my depth here and I'll just read (and might make minor adjustments to) the edits that I hope you both will make...  Lova Falk     talk   18:21, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Binding (linguistics) is a rather specific subject in generative linguistics (also "binding theory"). It does not refer to a taking together of elements in language in general, and it can be ignored in this article here. But thanks Looie for the remark!

With a focus on neuroscience, "our" binding problem has to do with Neural binding and Recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance. Still, the topic can be addressed from a more general (neuro)psychological or cognitive science perspective, and as we have seen, also (neuro/cogno-)philosophical perspective.

In general, I would prefer not to lose your interest in editing this article! Kindly, 㓟 (talk) 18:55, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

2015 update
Dear Wiki team, Last week we had an international workshop at the Institute of Philosophy in London held by the interdisciplinary Censes group, which in reality is more of a neuropsychological research collaboration than a philosophical one. Delegates included Semir Zeki and Colin Blakemore from neurophysiology, Uta Noppeney and Michael Morgan from neuropsychology and Barry Smith and Casey O'Callaghan from philosophy. It prompted me to look again at this wiki entry that is largely what I had written in about 2008, with some minor editing by others.

At the time I wrote the piece it seemed well received, in that I got a 'star' I think and some thanks. I wondered whether it would stand the test of time. It seems to have done but there still seems to be unease about the content. I had not had another attempt at trying to improve the text because I was unsure it would survive. However, I am now thinking that it might be worthwhile to try to resolve some of the issues people may have and also to deal with technical issues like citations. It also struck me that it would be useful to have an extra section on cross-modal or multimodal binding, since this is a very active field at present (whether taste and smell or sight and sound are bound in experience). It may be possible to draw on the expertise of the Censes team here and get a much more solid citation base and consensus.

From what I can see from the talk in 2013 the main concern of others is whether or not the focus on the existence of two types of problem is appropriate. There is a request for giving a clear definition first, with the variations being left for later. I think it might be possible to do this. However, the workshop we have just had again emphasised to me that the most important thing for anyone new to the field to know about this term is that there is no agreement as to what is meant by it. Question time was largely taken up by both neuroscientists and philosophers complaining that presenters' conclusions were hard to assess because the presenters had not indicated exactly what they were meaning by binding. In fact throughout the entire workshop nobody attempted to give any sort of biophysical account of what binding might be. This is of interest to me because I am a biologists and although interested in what philosophers have to say am primarily interested in generating a biophysical account.

The situation really is very difficult, even in terms of recognition of two different meanings of binding problem. Thus amongst the neuroscientists Blakemore has indicated to me that he sees feature binding (BP1) and phenomenal binding (BP2) as different levels of the same problem. On the other hand Zeki has indicated to me that he sees them as unrelated (referring to feature binding as Triesman's 'unbinding problem'). While I understand that encyclopedia writers want things cut and dried, as a scientist my instinct is to be very up front about the fact that they are not. 'Binding' is a metaphorical term and the reality is that nobody is quite sure what sort of physical process they think it is a metaphor for. I have recently considered that there may be a useful way to clarify this in terms of how we understand logic. The feature binding problem addresses the way the brain derives higher level propositional information from lower level information, as in: there is yellow here + there is a square here leads to there is a yellow square (here). So the biophysics will be an account of how an output is generated from an input. The phenomenal binding problem ('combination' problem) is simply the problem of what biophysical substrate allows information with several degrees of freedom, or several propositions, or at least a very complex proposition, to be available 'together' as a Gestalt in experience. A number of people doubt that it is necessary to even raise this second problem but most of the neuropsychologists are convinced that it is a real problem. (It is the philosophers and the some of the cellular neurophysiologists who are less keen, but for different reasons.) BP2 is purely an issue of input. Thus if we have 'Socrates is a man' and 'All men are mortal', BP1 is how 'Socrates is mortal' is derived in biophysical terms. BP2 is simply how the two premises come to be available together in biophysical terms regardless of what is to be deduced. That might seem like a narrow distinction but in reality the range of model levels you can apply to the two are quite different. Moreover, we have no idea what sort of output information perceived as a Gestalt leads to. It might just be 'signal for that pattern to be stored in memory/or not'.

I agree that it would be easy if we could discard the combination problem and focus purely on Triesman's unbinding problem. However, having this in mind after checking the wiki entry before the workshop started I tried to apply this to what the speakers were saying and could not. All of them were wanting to address both problems, some indicating that they distinguished them and some skating over that. So my feeling is that the distinctions made by Smythies and Revonsuo deserve introducing right at the start. There is no single meaning from which to divide. My primary field of research during my paid working life was immunology and I was all too familiar with terms like this that people thought they knew the meaning of but which had various different meanings that were conflated during a single presentation or article (like lymphocyte subset or autoimmunity or dendritic cell - the list is endless).

What was perhaps the most amusing part of the workshop was that some of the speakers had obviously checked Wikipedia before talking at a binding problem workshop!

Would you like me to try to tidy things up and clarify? And who should I correspond with in the Wiki team?

Lady Cairns ( Jonathan Edwards, Professor Emeritus University College London Department of Medicine) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lady Cairns (talk • contribs) 12:52, 28 September 2015 (UTC)


 * I certainly agree that it is essential to start by pointing out that "binding problem" means completely different things to different people, but I think perhaps it can be done in a way that is easier for readers to grasp. For reference let me point to the way I handled this in response to a question on Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-binding-problem-in-neuroscience.  Anyway, I encourage you to work on the article as much as you feel like, and I don't think you need to worry too much about people interfering with you as long as you don't use the article as a vehicle to express your personal opinions.  (Note by the way that you can automatically sign your talk page comments by typing ~ at the end.) Best regards, Looie496 (talk) 14:36, 28 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Dear Looie496,

Thanks for the reply. It is useful to see your take on this. I will try to find a way of introducing the problem that is easy for newcomers to grasp. What worries, me however, is that one needs to make sure they grasp the reality of the situation.

I don’t actually think philosophers use the term one way and neuroscientists another. That was not what was going on for either group last week. Some philosophers are only interested in unity of consciousness but most with a serious interest in the matter (e.g. Barry Smith, O’Callaghan, Bayne) are very interested in both questions. Neuroscientists are also interested in both. The problem is that in both camps some recognize the distinction between BP1 and BP2 and some gloss over it. If you take people interested in synchrony, like Von der Malsburg, Singer, Freeman, Crick, Buzsaki etc. they almost invariably imply that the two problems can be solved by the same mechanism. But since one is a triage problem and the other a combining problem it cannot be so. Put bluntly, the current neuroscience literature on ‘binding’ is a mess.

A quote from Ophelia Deroy’s (neuropsychologist) abstract last Friday is relevant: …these cases invite us to revise the concept of binding, or to find another conceptual framework altogether.

I also worry about explaining Treisman’s problem in terms of ‘how is red bound to square’. It is very unclear what ‘bound’ means here, or what is being bound – is it ‘qualia’ or is it the informational content? The difficulty with Treisman’s analysis is that it all relates to phenomena like ‘sensed red’ but the attempt at analysis is really a computational/logical/behavioural one. As a number of speakers indicated last week the problem could be solved preconsciously in V1-V4 etc. and the results dumped into conscious awareness further forward.

So I guess my major concern is giving an account that is ‘grasped’ but which does not do justice to the current rather turbulent academic field.

I note that someone above has mentioned neural binding and that took me to the neural binding entry, which I have not seen before. With all due respect to the author of this I have never heard or read the term ‘neural binding’ as far as I can remember. It seems misleading since whatever is being bound is definitely not neural – it is either qualia or propositional information. (I agree that binding in Chomskian etc. linguistics can be kept out of this since nobody talks of a binding problem there even if there is one and even if there is a deep relation in terms of syntactic/logical binding with the Triesman problem.)

To be a neural binding I guess one would have to suggest that action potentials were somehow bound and we know that they are not. Synchrony of firing has no functional effect per se. As Von der Malsburg indicates in his exposition but then conveniently seems to forget, synchrony only operates at the point of co-arrival of neurotransmitter at a downstream dendrite. So ‘binding’ is really cotemporal arrival such that, presumably because of a non-refractory state, the signal can co-contribute to some logical computation during post synaptic integration. In the great majority of the literature on synchrony this seems to get forgotten and we end up with models that have no real neuroscientific basis – like Crick. Like you, I have always been skeptical of synchrony models but in fact new work by people like Buszaki, Hausser and Tiesinga makes me think that it might solve Treisman’s problem (but does not address phenomenal binding).

I also note that in the neural binding entry there seems to be the sort of conflation of BP1 and BP2 I worry about – or at least a suggestion that these are of the same ilk. There are some senses in which that is OK but in terms of synchrony, as indicated above, it is a major problem.

I will have another look at the text and see if I can address some of the issues flagged up. ~

Lady Cairns (talk) 13:12, 29 September 2015 (UTC)


 * I think to some degree you're going about this suboptimally and making things too hard for yourself. In a Wikipedia article the goal is not so much to get it right as to neutrally report what the most authoritative sources say about the topic.  This applies even if you personally think those sources are off the mark.  So the best approach is to (a) figure out which are the most authoritative sources, and then (b) figure out how to explain to readers what they say.  So for example you can't in the Wikipedia article divide the problem into BP1 and BP2 in a particular way unless you can cite at least one authoritative source that divides it in the same way.  That constraint ought to simplify the problem. Looie496 (talk) 14:16, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Well I guess it does simplify, since Smythies and Revonsuo can reasonably be regarded as about as authoritative as you can get. John Smythies worked with Eccles in the 1950s and when I last communicated with him about 10 years ago he was still working with Ramachandran. Revonsuo is leading figure amongst philosophers interested in brain mechanisms and hosted the big Consciousness meeting this year in Helsinki. I quoted them because they give a clear account. Zeki, whose work on dissociated processing in visual cortex gives the problems their empirical base, has much the same view but has not as far as I know written it down quite so specifically (but I can ask him).

What is an 'authoritative source' if it gets things wrong?! To be honest, virtually any scholarly account of the binding problem points out that there are several of them - as you yourself do.

I agree that John's BP1 and BP2 nomenclature is not widely used and probably suboptimal. The popular terms are feature binding and phenomenal binding. I will try to work around these I think. Lady Cairns (talk) 08:27, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

BP1/2 concept nonconcept
Note added April 2016 by random neuroscientist reading this: nobody I have met talks about BP1 and BP2. This is not useful or memorable or common and doesn't belong in an encyclopedia. It smells like someone's pet... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2620:0:691:B309:7081:49E5:1D63:8945 (talk) 14:46, 26 April 2016 (UTC)


 * I agree. This article reads like a bunch of pseudoscientific woo written by a fanboy.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.95.43.249 (talk) 18:54, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

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Unnecessary complexity
I understand that this is a complex topic about a field that we have incomplete information, but some sections are hardly readable when compared to well written articles about other equally complex subjects. Take the section about cognitive science. It's very convoluted with an excess of parentheses that add little information and too much formality. Reads like a scientific literally review and seems to have been copied from somewhere, given the author didn't even bother to remove the references like (1) 2804:30C:B22:FC00:346E:E1C9:9FB5:2011 (talk) 03:41, 8 July 2023 (UTC)