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@Plinz,

I’d like a little more clarity since I assume you mean by ‘sound’ a ‘formal’ or ‘constructable’ explanation of ‘the physical, neurological, and associative construction of representation?

So Why Did It Take So Long?
Early 20th Century: Gestalt Psychology – how complex representations are produced in the mind.
1950s-1960s: Early cognitive models and generative grammar. (Age of the cognitive revolution)
1970s-1980s: Connectionism, formal semantics, and cognitive linguistics. (Distributed representation)
1990s-2000s: Embodied cognition, neuroimaging, corpus linguistics, and distributional semantics.
Recent Years: Computational models, deep learning, and cross-disciplinary research integrating multidimensional data analysis.

And;
1. Neurologically we do know.
2. The emergence of LLM’s have popularized what we have known.
3. Depending upon your meaning, yes, until Turing we didn’t have the theory we have now. (Because Babbage failed to produce a theory, costing us a century, and the divergence of mathematic, logic, philosophy, and physics that ensued).
4. And linguistics has, at least since Chomsky adapted Turing for grammar, but in particular at least the past three decades, known (and I employed seventy something library science people for years working on it);
5. Philosophers have discussed ‘what’s it like to think like a bat’, meaning embodiment, scale, and time differences.
6. Artists, whether visual, poetic, or musical, or literary have known and made use of it, despite not grasping its constitution.
7. Mythology and theology certainly have understood.
And while the ancients thought in atoms (objects) and did grasp that ‘there can’t be nothing because we can’t observe anything without something to compare it to’, so it’s just “persistent relations in time, all the way down”.

It Took A Profound Reversal in Our Thought
And we thought, until at least Popper, but it’s certainly still the main framework of human thought, that justification produced non-falsehood, when conversely, the universe consists of persistent relations, and all logic is falsificationary, and even with a full knowledge of all first principles in the universe, given limits on computational and mathematical reducibility cannot cover the scope of operational possibility, rendering prediction of possibilities limited to some general regularly of the emergence of new patterns.

So there is a pattern in the history of human cognition that like the arc from embodiment through to the operational logic of first principles that evolves from human object, space, background place and location use in wayfinding, and the parsimony of memory needed to remember routes, as well as the parsimony of language necessary to explain both routes and their increasingly abstract applications of wayfinding to all manner of thoughts … that the brain is working in the opposite direction from distributed information, eliminating all information that does not consist of relations, and then combining those relations into perceptions we can then use to wayfind.

So it’s natural that given all of our introspectively possible cognition would result from such objects and justifications that we would fail to observe the unintrospectable construction of those things from nothing but relations in time between vibrations of neurons.

Cheers.
CD

Reply addressees: @Plinz