The idea that diverse abilities such as vision, touch, language, and philosophy are fundamentally the same is hard for many people to accept. Mountcastle didn’t propose what the common function is, and it is hard to imagine what it could be, so it is easy to ignore his proposal or reject it outright. For example, linguists often describe language as different from all other cognitive abilities. If they embraced Mountcastle’s proposal, they might look for the commonality between language and vision to better understand language. For me, this idea is too exciting to ignore, and I find that the
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