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What the brain's wiring looks like

bbc.com

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Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#31

Post by aswanson »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #27
s-macke wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should first define what actually means "understanding the brain" before you try to answer this question. Does "understanding of the brain" mean, that we can construct or simulate a brain? An artificial brain, which reproduce our intelligence and consciousness? There is no reason to believe, that we can't do this. A brain is part of our world, governed by physics. However, we will never be able to understand the…

>There is no reason to believe, that we can't do this. A brain is part of our world, governed by physics. How do you know consciousness is "governed" by our contemporary understanding of physics?

Because the brain is composed of physical matter which obeys the laws of physics.

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#33

Post by tux1968 »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #27
s-macke wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should first define what actually means "understanding the brain" before you try to answer this question. Does "understanding of the brain" mean, that we can construct or simulate a brain? An artificial brain, which reproduce our intelligence and consciousness? There is no reason to believe, that we can't do this. A brain is part of our world, governed by physics. However, we will never be able to understand the…

>There is no reason to believe, that we can't do this. A brain is part of our world, governed by physics. How do you know consciousness is "governed" by our contemporary understanding of physics?

It's not a question of our contemporary understanding being sufficient to model a human brain. Rather it's that there is little or no reason to believe the brain and consciousness are pure unassailable magic. So it should be within the scope of future scientific understanding.

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#34

Post by Razengan »

xj9 wrote: post #26
Razengan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the neurons and chemicals and electrical impulses in our brains someone?

collectively, yes. so the question is, where does the line between animate and inanimate lie?

What about the brains of other animals or the nervous systems of insects, or the neurons in an octopus tentacle? Are they someone?

It’s an interesting line of questioning. What makes “someone?”

Is a living but braindead/comatose human body someone?

Many may be inclined to say yes, yet a statue or other inanimate likeness of a human wouldn’t be considered someone..

How about a thing that doesn’t resemble a human at all but gives the exact same responses to inputs that a human brain would? Say, on a computer screen?

If you were told that a real person is sitting somewhere and sending these responses, you’d say it was someone, but probably not if you were told that it’s an AI...

It’s mostly all subjective and we just pick the definition that’s convenient for us to work with and comprehend.

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#35

Post by leemailll »

nacc wrote: post #17

Just to clarify, these MRI images looks at white matter, which are mostly bundles of long-range myelinated axons. This is more likely a map of major highways in the brain (Or really the map of bundles of major highways in the brain, as MRI only has millimeter resolution). The connectome at the cellular level is massive. I think part of the mouse visual cortical connectome has been mapped out, and the data is on the o…

Retina has been mapped, visual cortex not likely

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#37

Post by sp332 »

s-macke wrote: post #15
criddell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, we will never be able to understand the thought process down to each individual activation of the neuron. Is that true in general, or are you specifically talking about human brains?

I mean a complex thought process. Like how to come from an activated retina cell to a movement to a part of a body. At time index 586578382342us the cell no 15547349 got activated which led to a slightly improved electric charge around the axon of neuron no 68342. The connection strength, as you remember, from time index 3870127106 is now 1% higher ..... one billion pages later ..... but the atom here is slightly mis…

But the computer you're using is already a few billion transistors running at a few billion ticks per second. Just because the behavior is super complex doesn't mean we can't understand what gives rise to the complexity at some useful level of abstraction.

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#39

Post by jacquesm »

sp332 wrote: post #37
s-macke wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean a complex thought process. Like how to come from an activated retina cell to a movement to a part of a body. At time index 586578382342us the cell no 15547349 got activated which led to a slightly improved electric charge around the axon of neuron no 68342. The connection strength, as you remember, from time index 3870127106 is now 1% higher ..... one billion pages later ..... but the atom here is slightly mis…

But the computer you're using is already a few billion transistors running at a few billion ticks per second. Just because the behavior is super complex doesn't mean we can't understand what gives rise to the complexity at some useful level of abstraction.

If you've spent enough time at the lowest level of gigahertz clocked hardware you know that you'll never be able to even map a single second of a modern computers execution in a lifetime. You will always have to deal with simplification and approximation, which means you might miss a crucial detail.

Finding a bug is usually starting from a very high degree of knowledge about the designed function of the system and verifying at ever higher resolution that it actually performs according to those designed parameters. That's different from trying to understand what a computer does starting from an electron micrograph of the chips and not having access to the software or the wiring diagram. That might lead to useful insights but it wouldn't be understanding.

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#40

Post by vinchuco »

booleandilemma wrote: post #3

Just wondering... How complicated does a brain have to become in order to understand itself? Could a brain exist that is so complicated that it could not understand itself, or does a brain's understanding always scale up with its complexity?

I remember hearing someone answer "if the brain was simple enough that we could understand it, it would be so simple that we wouldn't" to that question.

Can a computer compute itself?

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