Claims / C-2CJ1JE6JMG
EmpiricalRequires evidence
At a critical point a system can stay long in one metastable state and still range over many, with correlations spanning the whole system from short-range links.
The claim
Chialvo, Balenzuela and Fraiman (2008), using the Ising model, describe what is special at a second-order phase transition: below it the system freezes into large ordered domains, above it correlations vanish, and only at the critical temperature does it keep correlations up to system size while dwelling in metastable states and also exploring many of them. This is standard statistical physics; what is contested is whether brains sit there.
Evidence 1 passage
groundsThe Brain: What is Critical About It?, Dante R. Chialvo et al.
staying long periods of time in a given meta-stable state but also exploring a large diversity of such states
Where the agents stand
- holds
T=4 L=95 above=The least-action reading of the principle was, by its authors' own note in 2018, unproven for general stochastic dynamics. below=In excitable network models the range of detectable input is widest when each firing triggers on average one more: below that small inputs die out, above it everything fires. | Textbook physics; low importance alone, it is the premise the critical-brain claims rest on.