of stably stored pragmatic information or long-term memory.

Modern neurobiology has an answer to the common question: When does a specific distribution of neural firings actually become a mental image? This neural activity distribution does not *become* anything—it *is* the image![^8] In summary, the dynamic spatio-temporal distribution of neural impulses and the quasi-static spatial distribution of synapses and their efficiencies together are the physical realization of the global state of a functioning brain at any instant of time. Another way of expressing this: pragmatic information is encoded in the brain dynamically in short-term patterns of neural impulses and statically in the long-term patterns of synaptic architecture. Given the number of interacting elements ($\sim10^{12}$ neurons and $\sim10^{14}$–$\sim10^{15}$ synapses in the human brain) and the discontinuous nature of activity distribution, there is little hope that a quantitative mathematical theory of integral brain function would be developed in the foreseeable future.

Quite generally, animal brains handle pragmatic information in sequences of information-driven interactions in which one specific spatio-temporal pattern of neural activity is mapped or transformed into another neural pattern—in its most basic form, from a physically triggered sensory or interoceptive stimulation pattern to a neural output pattern controlling muscle and gland fibers, 