Data, e.g. "PETER", are not held "in the system" themselves, but are represented by "placeholders" or the linking of "placeholders". The data itself is therefore not "in the system", but can only be generated from it again. Pile is in this respect bidirectional and stands thus in contrast to e.g. neural networks, which encode data/signals also, but do not produce again reliably. But this is not their purpose. But that is the purpose of a pile – and in this respect it is and remains a data storage device. (Ralf Westphal (2006), personal commun
encodes the Expected Certainty about Desired Outcomes
* values. ⇒ ATMEL Tiny 12
“The whole function of the brain is summed up in: error correction.” So wrote W. Ross Ashby, the British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, some half a century ago.
T. Parr and K. J. Friston, “Generalised free energy and active inference,” Biol Cybern, vol. 113, no. 5, pp. 495–513, Dec. 2019, doi: 10.1007/s00422-019-00805-w.