OK, I'm not a neuroscientist. But I really don't think this is true: "The basic premise of neuroscience is that patterns of neural activity carry some information — they are about something." I don't think you need 'aboutness' to do neuroscience, no more than you need it to do physics or chemistry. The need for 'aboutness' comes up only when you're trying to make the (to my mind unjustified) leap from neural phenomena to cognitive phenomena, instantiated in the current article by the leap from neural to mental representations. Kevin Mitchjell here makes use of the device of the 'umwelt' to make his point: "the umwelt also crucially entails valence, salience and relevance — it is a self-centered map of things in the environment that the organism can detect and that it cares about." That may be so - it may be that valence, salience and relevance are necessary for an umwelt, but not (I would argue) sufficient to entail it.
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