We fundamentally don't know anything about what the (necessary) "fixed-points" of concepts are. There must be some latent structure the concept is being "passed" around in a way that is de-constructable, but it just happens that location is not it and no competitors are clear frontrunners
yeah that is one of my biggest problems with neuroscience: addressability in a system which seems substantially nonlocal
Some competitors/supplements to spatial just in case you want to read more are (in any combination): - Topological (spatial or functional, I think spatial topological models are silly tho) - Frequency/power spectrum-ish stuff - Functional connectivity kinds of things - Whatever Friston is on about
yeah, i was actually just thinking through how i'd build addressability via cumulative noise, and, like, "well, if the noise spectrum were 1/f, then so long as the dominant frequencies in the characteristic noise were fixed points (and we ran a high-pass filter) then plasticity wouldn't be that bad.
I'm pretty sure fixed-ish oscillation frequencies (alpha, beta, whatnot) do (in theory) serve the purpose of addressability in the brain in the frequency band/functional connectivity literature, but I don't have a great source
But that's on the order of like, "OK, we're doing forward messages now" "OK backward messages time" back and forth a few times a second, not like "this came from x=20, y=-3 in the visual field"
For more understood neural (not well understood) solutions to addressability, hippocampal conceptual-spatial maps are neat too (www.jneurosci.org/content/40/3...)