Where is the cat? A bottleneck at the interface of biology and artificial cognition
The bottleneck Consider a cat in a room. The cat emits photons. The photons reach the retina, are transduced into action potentials, and propagate through the optic nerve to V1 and downstream associative areas. At every step of this chain the cat is no longer there. There is only electrochemical activity. Yet when you close your eyes, the cat is there. Something happened along the way that converted a distributed physical activity into an internal representation reconvocable in the absence of the source. In artificial systems, the question is different. The cat does not leave the chain in the same …
