atyy said:
If there are multiple stable attractors without plasticity, couldn't a change of attitude be a change of the attractor whose basin of attraction you are in?
This reminds me of two things. 1) have you ever heard of chaotic itinerancy?
2) a thread where I asked a similar question nearly 2.5 years ago. (My empirical suggestion is kind of silly after having taken all of the local neuroscience classes and being exposed to real experimental methods.)
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=346790&highlight=memory
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thoughts:
The concept of a stable attractor can be applied in all kinds of ways though; If it's a true stable attractor, there's no getting off it, unless there's an externtal perturbation, but then you can always make the perturbation part of the system, in which, case the attractor is only transient, since it can be moved off of. But I think you mean to intentionally separate external (environment) from internal (organism).
The reality is that there's all kinds of different cues going on from both inside and outside the body; from the rest of the body, immediate environmental changes, and day/night changes; all of which metabolically modulate important proteins like Post-Synaptic Density (PSD-95), by changing PSD-95's transcription rate, and all acting over different temporal scales, so there's always plasticity happening and how that influences attitude hasn't been separated from how external perturbations (environment) can shift attractor states. There'st also evidence showing that the lateral distribution of receptors across the post-synaptic cell can change synaptic strength. So you can have the same number of receptors but acting differently as a function of how they distribute themselves spatially (and this is not a constant over time!).
But you're right, some emergent phenomena like "atittude" probably isn't necessarily bound only to synaptic plasticity. But I still think there is a strong case that this plasticity that is always happening keeps the system dynamic and sensitive to perturbations, allows us to store thoughts and associate stimuli with feelings. Particular behaviors are associated with particular attitudes (which way does causation go, or is there any? They are both very possibly simultaneously modulated by a third system (the external envrionment).
Lastly, the "binding problem" has some approaches where we only experience what we experience, all senses bound together, because we are "writing" the current moment to our hippocampus, where all the sensory signals are bound, together with expectation signals (like semantics and world model). If the implications of this research ever come to dominate the field, we might consider that plasticity is absolutely necessary for your every cognitive moment.
Interesting question!
