Mental Recognition of Objects via Ramsey Sentences

Dogs display vast phenotypic diversity, including differences in height, skull shape, tail, etc. Yet, humans are almost always able to quickly recognize a dog, despite no single feature or group of features are critical to distinguish dogs from other objects/animals. In search of the mental activities leading human individuals to state _“I see a dog_”, we hypothesize that the brain might extract meaningful information from the environment using Ramsey sentences-like procedures. To turn the proposition _“I see a dog”_ in a Ramsey sentence, the term dog must be replaced by a long and complex assertion consisting only of observational terms, existential quantifiers and operational rules. The Ramsey sentence for _“I see a dog”_ sounds: “_There is at least an entity called dog which satisfies the following conditions: it is an animal, it has four legs, …, etc, …, and is something that I have in my sight_”. We discuss the biological plausibility and the viable neural correlates of a Ramsey-like mechanism in the central nervous system. We accomplish a brain-inspired, theoretical neural architecture consisting of a parallel network that requires virtually no memory, is devoid of probabilistic choices and can analyze huge but finite amounts of unique visual details, combining them in a single concept. In sum, Ramsey sentence stands for a versatile tool that can be used not just as a methodological device to cope with biophysical affairs, but also for a model to describe the real functioning of cognitive operations such as sensation and perception.