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Appendix1: Fields and networks Imagining the brain not like a computer ... or a telephone exchange; more like a vast aggregate of interactive events in a jungle Tononi, Sporns and Edelman 1992, 69 Imagining the brain is at this point a fictional exercise. We are not yet structured to do it right, so we must acknowledge our metaphorical liberties. If we honour its evolved origins and continued participation in organicnature, we could perhaps be bolder and more visual than we have been. We could say the brain is like a plant that has grown lawfully from a point, or maybe like a garden that has flourished from many points, each yielding its characteristic texture. Or that it is like an earth composed of many sizes and colors of grain, penetrated by very soft rootlets, traversed by chemical seeps. We could say cortical structure is like stream bed silt scored by twining rivulets into precisely fluid channels that take account of every shape in the terrain. Or that it is like a cloud that reforms constantly, at many points at once, condensing around elements that are charged and mobile but invisible until the white vapour marks them. Or, most accurately perhaps, we can imagine the brain as a sea traversed by precise and fluid streams of electrical and chemical activity, in effect by streams of change. We can imagine some of these streams as originating at sensory surfaces and propagated through brainstem and midbrain into and throughout the cortex. They can be imagined splitting into streamlets, diverging, reconverging, joining streams with other origins. Unlike the streamlets scoring sand or silt, these streams circle back on themselves, form loops at many scales -- minute loops within a cortical column, larger loops connecting regions in a lobe, and even larger inter-organ loops from midbrain or cerebellum to cortex. Connected streams that loop back onto themselves can be imagined as three-dimensional nets or webs. Since they are nets of electromagnetic effect, they can be imagined as nets of light. Since they may reach from many sources through many centers, at all levels and in all regions of the brain, they may be thought of as parts of even wider nets pegged at many points. We could imagine the many origins of the flow of light, some always active, some dying out as others erupt. The streams that fan out from these sources join each other at many centers. At any moment the net can be dense in some places and loose or absent in others, and it must be imagined as changing shape, shifting suddenly or slowly, dancing into new areas, maybe strobing or flickering. We could also imagine a smaller but brighter net, based in the larger net but moving at a different speed, maybe more stable, maybe flickering at a different rate, and shifting about in the areas brought alive by the global net. The wide net figure can help with thinking the nuances of knowing. That is the main thing. I want to imagine the immediate and central means of sentience integrated and distributed because understanding them that way gives me a way to think about for instance linguistic or musical or even mathematical knowing as they are experienced. Here's an example: linguistic predication. To predicate is to use linguistic forms in such a way that people are organized to think of some thing in a particular way. The berries are ripe. When we say that, we are organized to think, imagine, see, regard -- to be related, or as if related, to -- berries in terms of ripeness. Should topic evocation and predication be thought of as separate acts? Do they happen in different places? Probably not. There is a dynamical sequence. If we think of a wide net evoked by a name and then modified by subsequent language, we can imagine the effect of a sentence as accumulating modifications of the form of a net, and of the over-all effect of the sentence as an achieved dynamic result. Where name-effect is not as specific as we need it to be, we use a predicate to modify it. Structure is evoked, and then that structure is modified. Whole paragraphs can be thought of as modifying the effect of an evoked topic. In this way, a wide net metaphor can make Wittgenstein's seeing as a central instance of linguistic effect, rather than a representational puzzle. - from Being about Chapter 6, Ellie Epp