61–70 of 105 posts
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The idea of a brain API is both amazing and terrifying.
One could argue that such an API exists. It even understands natural language!
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…
You're also wrong about the religious part. Plenty of people who believe in a god or gods believe that humans were created along with the rest of the universe, but many don't believe that they were designed in any useful sense of the word. You can talk to pretty much any scientist who's religious about that. E.g., a Christian astronomer may believe that his god started it all going with the big bang, but does not specifically intervene in the unfolding of creation except at specific points where miracles happen.
> you ascribe (what can ironically be described as divine) mysteriousness and inscrutability to a body organ
I don't in the slightest. I'm pointing at the contrast between my expectations about a) a system that has been expressly designed by minds similar mind to serve me and be comprehensible to them for ongoing work, and b) something that evolved over time with no such constraints. One can eventually come to understand something like that, but I think it would be foolish for an electronics expert to crack open a skull and expect that it would make sense in the same way that they would experience if they opened an iPhone.
> I've taken uncharitable tone with this comment
Yes. And given that I'm talking about my close relatives with brain tumors, I think you've picked a terrible place to do it.
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... and then does the opposite of what it’s told.
It's an API. Nobody said the purpose was for it to do as it's told. It accepts input and responds according to its own training. Disobedience is a feature.
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minds are much more complicated 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 evolut…
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. We designed everything in a smartphone and can say with confidence that it works a certain way, and even explain why. The brain was designed by evolution, and while we mostly understand what it does, we aren't quite sure of the how and why yet.
Perhaps. While the mobile phone might be more complicated than the human brain (I suspect not), that doesn't mean that the human brain is perfectly understandable.
The smartphone was designed by a large number of groups that all built and shared abstractions with the express purpose of these being understandable by other groups. The smart phone's design is purposely built to be comprehensible to the human mind. There is no clear reason to expect that there are clean, human friendly abstractions we can make about all the different layers on which the brain inter-operates.
To analogize to software, it may be like the difference between diving into well documented code that has: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries and design patterns, hardware agnostic implementation, a modern programming language vs code that was coded by a self-taught developer using design patterns that they made up, employs no separation of concerns and relies on hardware timing and interference quirks.
The former may have far more complicated functionality, but still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand.
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…
minds are much more complicated 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 evolut…
I'll add that the neurologists I've talked with understand a great deal about the hardware of the brain; the organ has been receiving intense study for a long time. But even for them their most common reaction is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when confronted with basic questions like "why is he doing that?" and "will he get better or worse?"
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…
Absolutely agreed. Brains are bizarre. My mother-in-law once had what we (and her primary physician) believed was a serious flu. The moment we realized that it was much worse than that was when she started calmly speaking total nonsense. She appeared to think it was normal English, but each word was unintelligible, though it used plausible parts of speech. At that moment I picked her up and drove her to the E.R., aft…
I have no idea how that plumbing is connected, but I have seen it happen myself, and apparently it's a not-uncommon experience for people with Alzheimer's: https://www.alzheimers.net/2014-04-03/connection-between-uti...
And yes, it is entirely freaky when somebody you have known for years starts talking utter gibberish and clearly expects to be understood. It feels deeply unreal.
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…
Not questioning the husband's devotion to his wife, but it seems a bit odd to me that he would take an 18 month sabbatical and focus on re-teaching her a language that keeps slipping out of her mind due to brain injury. You would think that teaching himself German would be the low-hanging fruit.
The article doesn't say he took a sabbatical to re-teach her English -- it says he took the sabbatical to support her. It also doesn't say he didn't work on improving his German during that time.
Brain injuries are EXTREMELY difficult and time consuming to recover from, far more so than more typical injuries. The woman in the article was almost certainly going through a massive adjustment and needed tons of help. It's not a simple matter of a bump on the leg and shoulder, and whoops, she's living in a country where she doesn't know the language, as if she was a tourist.
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I mean, other than not being able to communicate with her children or fellow Canadians.
I was talking about the children.
For the example above, it could be
"i don't remember"
=> memory blocked
=> too much information interference
OR
emotional hinderance like fear of remembering
OR
insufficient information to recall
Here is a theory: Prior chronic emotional pain can stymy recovery of cognition permanently. Beneficial emotions can activate new parts of the brain and create new personalities unlike what existed before.