Interesting that Mark Churchland is the son of the 'neurophilosophers' Patricia and Paul Churchland. I'm not sure about Patricia but Paul was (maybe still is) a strong advocate of eliminative materialism who also discussed geometric representations of mental representation as points in a multidimensional state space over 20 years ago.
> "A clustered representation ... Sherry Choi/adapted from Bernardi et al. 2020"
Why do the authors (of any scientific papers) use a 3-D representation for their diagram? Why are the axis not labeled? It is unclear to me the same diagram could not be constructed in 2-D. Kind'a fluffy.
I think it is not the original figure from the paper but a sketch adapted for general audience? The publishers are now starting to ask scientists to engage audience by "simplified" plots/sketches and keep detailed accurate plots for close community.
> "The publishers are now...'simplified' plots/sketches.."
In fact simplified plots are not new, but rather a common ignorance. On the flip side the "close community" frequently demonstrates their own conceit in their diagrams by frequently failing to go just a small distance more to label their axis. /RANT
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