Let us start with separate individual entities (vagueness about this is a problem, but in some versions, the entities are somebody's idea of a "neuron") that are bound together progressively by a Hebbian principle of "what fires together, wires together" [very poetic]. The result is that clusters arise as groups of associated individuals. But we can arrive at the same groupings by a "Persigian" principle that starts with a single large group of all the individuals, then splits up that group, a bit at a time.
I just realized something cool about the difference between a bottom-up Hebbian grouping and a top-down Persigian grouping: Persigian grouping leaves behind a sequence of larger groups so, as a procedure, it produces a hierarchy in the course of generating the final grouping. The Hebbian procedure does not. In other words, all the looser associations that are a biproduct of the top-down procedure are absent from a bottom-up procedure.
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