41–50 of 105 posts
I put Sweden in parentheses with a question mark because I can’t be sure that is in fact Sweden. It could also be the US. I read about it awhile ago and not in English. Sorry.
I know someone who had a similar experience after an operation where he wasn't able to speak English, only Spanish. Interesting thing was, his mother tongue is English and he learned Spanish when he was around 20. He eventually recovered after a few hours, but I've always wondered how it would feel to know you knew a language perfectly at one point yet be unable to understand it in the moment.
This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…
It does seem like a reasonable statement, but when you take a bit of time to think about it, billions of people disagree with it. A sobering thought.
> so there's no expectation that they should make sense under the hood
What doesn't make sense is that at first you deny a religious explanation, then without skipping a beat you ascribe (what can ironically be described as divine) mysteriousness and inscrutability to a body organ.
This not only doesn't pass the Occam's razor test, but also assumes a defeatist position that "we might never know for sure".
EDIT: I've taken uncharitable tone with this comment, and it may come across as too personal, which wasn't my intention.
This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…
If you search around the 'net you'll find a number of cases in which a person's principle language has changed after a traumatic brain injury. Some people have even become fluent in a language they only recalled a pidgin vocabulary from before. Perhaps more common, but still quite rare at about one person per year worldwide, is something called foreign accent syndrome. In which a head injury causes someone with one r…
This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…
It's actually not clear if brains are more complicated to understand than modern smartphones. Modern smartphones are designed using numerous abstraction levels - it makes it easier to design, but harder to understand if you don't know those abstractions. Brain, on the other hand, might have fewer fundamental algorithms/methods. In fact, most of the brain complexity could just be evolutionary quirks, some to make to make it's slightly more efficient, others to make some biological functions easier, etc. In the end, it might turn out that the actual human intelligence is not that hard to understand once we got through understanding all those design quirks.
This might sound ridiculous - after all a human brain looks so much more complex than an iPhone! But if you didn't know anything about transistors, analog circuit design, digital logic design, computer architecture, OS architecture, and software engineering (not to mention the complexity of cellular protocols), you would have a really hard time reverse engineering a smartphone.
This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…
> b) they aren't designed It does seem like a reasonable statement, but when you take a bit of time to think about it, billions of people disagree with it. A sobering thought. > so there's no expectation that they should make sense under the hood What doesn't make sense is that at first you deny a religious explanation, then without skipping a beat you ascribe (what can ironically be described as divine) mysteriousne…
just because there isn't any intelligence involved, doesn't mean that the brain isn't a meticulously crafted piece of perfection.
I've some weird type of a migraine which sometimes I'm not able to read or speak properly in English or Spanish (Always one of these combinations, fortunately). It's like I forgot how the words are "divided by syllables" and I'm not able to read or speak properly. Fortunately, it's for a few minutes and I got a migraine just one or two times a year. I went to the doctor and he said it's not dangerous and there is not…
This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…
> b) they aren't designed It does seem like a reasonable statement, but when you take a bit of time to think about it, billions of people disagree with it. A sobering thought. > so there's no expectation that they should make sense under the hood What doesn't make sense is that at first you deny a religious explanation, then without skipping a beat you ascribe (what can ironically be described as divine) mysteriousne…
Are you saying that if we don't understand something, it follows that it must be of divine origin? That hardly makes sense. I don't see the contradiction in the op you seem to see here.