Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What the brain's wiring looks like

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 121 posts

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#51

Post by nwjtkjn »

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…

This might be naive, but I wonder if the essential part of mouse data could be compressed if only we understood it better.

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#52

Post by goatlover »

JepZ wrote: post #44
odreem wrote: post #36

The real challenge here is to understand the brain, and consciousness, without putting it in computer terminology. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...

Sorry, but the author of that article clearly does not understand... It doesn't matter if humans store data the way computers do, the point is, that humans can be abstracted as state machines. Yes, humans are certainly different than our PCs today, but that does not mean that the principles are so different. E.g. humans seem to use a lot of lossy 'compression' while that is something we try to avoid in software in re…

Alternatively, it's a seductive metaphor because humans love to try to explain one thing in terms of another. Thus the universe is like a clock, and the laws of physics operate like clockwork. Until QM and the metaphor broke down.

Similarly, the brain is like a computer. Until it's not.

Interesting how nobody runs it the other way. A computer is like the brain. Why don't we? Probably because we understand computers a lot better than brains, and use that analogy to make sense of something otherwise mysterious.

None of this has anything to do with a soul, btw. It's all a matter of how we think about things.

The mistake is when we take our metaphors literally and try to make domain B fit into domain A, despite obvious differences. Then we end up with a convoluted view of B that's been distorted by being mapped onto A.

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#53

Post by vilhelm_s »

nwjtkjn wrote: post #51
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…

This might be naive, but I wonder if the essential part of mouse data could be compressed if only we understood it better.

The mouse genome is only 160 megabytes, and contains the instructions for building the brain as well as building everything else, so the "secret sauce" of how to make an intelligent brain should not be extremely large, once you figure out how to do it. :) A lot of the actual connections must be either random, or encoding things the mouse learnt while growing up.

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#54

Post by agumonkey »

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…

TB of raw data but could it be structured and "compressed" logically ?

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#55

Post by nikki93 »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #53
nwjtkjn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be naive, but I wonder if the essential part of mouse data could be compressed if only we understood it better.

The mouse genome is only 160 megabytes, and contains the instructions for building the brain as well as building everything else, so the "secret sauce" of how to make an intelligent brain should not be extremely large, once you figure out how to do it. :) A lot of the actual connections must be either random, or encoding things the mouse learnt while growing up.

the "learning" can come from things like the compounds in various food and so on! "learning" is, in a generalized sense, any non-genetically-bootstrapped environment->body information transference...

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#56

Post by jnicholasp »

aswanson wrote: post #31
wu-ikkyu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> Because the brain is composed of physical matter

Is consciousness?

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#57

Post by IanCal »

wildmusings wrote: post #42
wu-ikkyu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 unfortunate that you're being downvoted. This is a classic and unsolved problem in the philosophy of mind and the people stating confidently that of course the mind is a purely physical system are ignoring many problems with that hypothesis, not least the lack of any conclusive evidence for it.

Can you really have conclusive evidence for "there is no magic"?

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#58

Post by babyrainbow »

s-macke wrote: post #7
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?

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…

> A brain is part of our world, governed by physics...

Sure. But not necessary governed by current physics..

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#59

Post by dredmorbius »

vinchuco wrote: post #40
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?

IC design is largely a process of simulating and specifying the next generation of integrated circuits.

So in the strict sense, not only can a computer compute itself, but it can compute its (more capable) successor generation.

Practically, this now occurs in large server farms, so it takes a large number of computers to compute themselves and/or progeny. But this is very much what happens.

Re: What the brain's wiring looks like

#60

Post by tux1968 »

goatlover wrote: post #50
tux1968 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The brain and consciousness need not be magic for the philosophical issue to arise. The fundamental question is objectivity vs subjectivity. Consciousness is subjective, yet science is an objective affair. Can the objective be used to explain the subjective, or is the objective an abstraction from intersubjective experiences? If it's the latter, then the project to explain everything in scientific terms is doomed, be…

Either consciousness lives in the physical constructs of the human brain or it is supernatural / "magic". If the first case is true, then there is every reason to believe it is open to the scrutiny of the scientific process. What we know for sure is that there are very many scientific questions about the brain that still remain to be answered before we have to throw up our hands and admit that it is all ineffable.

IMO science is doomed to always leave something out as you say.. it will reach a fundamental building block that simply exists, can not be expressed in terms of something else and might as well be called God. But i just haven't heard any convincing arguments that consciousness can't be understood before we reach that point.

Post reply on HN