Multiple patterns emerged under discriminative conditioning.
We say that the control of the system dynamics is shifted from a point
attractor to a chaotic attractor. This simply means that the system falls
into a condition of restless, but bounded, activity. It is stationary in the
statistical sense, but its mathematical properties differ from those
of "noise".
Both systems display the capacity for abrupt, dramatic, global jumps from
one state to another. These are the bifurcations. These are analogous to
phase transitions in physical systems: ice to water to steam, for example.
The bifurcations occur in many forms and varieties, so a formal definition
is difficult if not impossible to provide.
Whatever "meaning" they have is embedded in the self–organized matrix
of the entire brain. We have no way of knowing what constitutes
a "completed" pattern or how to distinguish it from an "incomplete" one,
either in terms of neural activity patterns or the mental life of an animal,
presuming it exists. The pattern–completion concept is realizable only in
terms of ideographs or conventional signs and symbols, and if we reject
these, as we have for neurophysiology, then the concept too must go.
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