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What makes these different theories – from Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume and current cognitive neuroscience – all theories about the mind or brain sampling the world? Hobbes certainly did not see himself as updating Aquinas and Aristotle in such a direct fashion, but he might have. This is because we can find a sense to saying that the patterns in the two domains – world and brain – are the same. And the sameness here is mathematico-empirical inter-derivability (Dayan & Abbott, 2001). That is, there is a description of the environmental cause from which, given the appropriate empirical algorithms, a description of the effect can be derived and vice versa. At the core of sampling theories is a notion of instantiating the same things, forms, qualities or patterns of activity.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137315588_2

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