The Neocortex Manifesto

This is something I wrote while doing Unit D with Jeff a while back.


THE NEOCORTEX MANIFESTO


'The neocortex is the top layer of the cerebral hemispheres, responsible for human sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought, and language. It is the substratum of emergent complex systems and patterns that generate our experience. It is an open-ended system that allows adaptive/creative connection with information in a dynamic reality. It is a stratagem that calls for a dynamic approach to dealing with information and research.

Contemporary urban existence generates information on a scale and speed that is too fast for the classical notions of taxonomy. Typing ‘Isle of Dogs’ as a search-field in Google generates around 1.5 million entries. Information overload is the permanent condition of our contemporary existence. It doesn’t bring us closer to objective reality. Human cognitive perception is forever filtered by preconceived systems. However, the impossibility of perceiving objective reality makes any predefined classification presumptuous and even manipulative of the interpretation of reality.

The neocortex approach is to shed the paradigms and taxonomies of old knowledge to allow dynamic taxonomies to emerge from the direct experience of information. We believe that our research is an opportunity to test a new means of pattern recognition, where relationships are grown, where relevance is induced and organization begins to emerge.'

This might be of relavence to our up coming Urban Fields Study.