Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
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Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
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Re: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
#2> being young is like microdosing on LSD all the time
If we invent significant life extension, microdosing may be a required part of the protocol just to keep the brain plastic enough to function. It may already be beneficial as a routine geriatric prescription. "Go play with grandma, she's on her weekly trip."
Re: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
#3Another major area of life. Nice to read.
Re: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
#4> But we’ve also mostly been doing it wrong, trying to explain the brain using methods that couldn’t possibly generate insight about the things we care about.
Wow, it must suck to work in neuroscience and find out that your entire field is pointless because this guy says so.
Re: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
#5To hold a concept of certain complexity within the brain the brain itself must have greater complexity than the concept.
Thus humans can never understand the brain because the brain has equal complexity to itself and for the brain to understand the brain then it must have greater complexity than itself which is impossible.
Like many other things in life, we can only hope to understand a simplified and symbolic representation of brain. The problem is... it's quite possible that human intelligence itself has no higher level abstraction that we are capable of holding in our head. The processes that create consciousness, stripped of all the fluff and irrelevant details, may be of sufficient complexity that our brains will not be able understand what's going on.
In short I fear that the ultimate goal of neurology may be a fruitless endeavor.
Re: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
#6To hold a concept of certain complexity within the brain the brain itself must have greater complexity than the concept. Thus humans can never understand the brain because the brain has equal complexity to itself and for the brain to understand the brain then it must have greater complexity than itself which is impossible. Like many other things in life, we can only hope to understand a simplified and symbolic repres…
This sounds eerily similar to some of the early proofs of God. I think there may be a flaw in this line of thinking.
|Thus humans can never understand the brain because the brain has equal complexity to itself and for the brain to understand the brain then it must have greater complexity than itself which is impossible.
We don't need to know the entire state of the brain at any given moment to understand the mechanics of the brain, just as we don't need to know the entire state of every molecule on planet Earth in order to understand it's physics.
Re: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
#7This is really interesting but I would almost use the word "pseudoscience".
I mean a lot of it seems to be on the right track to me in a broad way, but its problematic because it is a mashup of real scientific ideas but the process seems to be more like a philosophical essay. You can't get scientific or engineering progress from philosophy.
There are good reasons that most of academia moved on from philosophy.
Re: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
#8To hold a concept of certain complexity within the brain the brain itself must have greater complexity than the concept. Thus humans can never understand the brain because the brain has equal complexity to itself and for the brain to understand the brain then it must have greater complexity than itself which is impossible. Like many other things in life, we can only hope to understand a simplified and symbolic repres…
The problem with your line of reasoning, is that you are thinking in technological progress only through individual achievement.
This is what technological iterations, through generations of human beings, give us all. Humans achieve super-human level of technological achievements because we iterate over what others have left for us.
Knowledge is like a stair, made from the hard work of many great human beings, and even for hard problems, with enough ammount of iterations, and with consecutive progress (without social deterioration) we can achieve anything.
Somebody will fill that "last" step in the stair that will make a paradigm shift to all of us..
Re: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
#9This is really interesting but I would almost use the word "pseudoscience". I mean a lot of it seems to be on the right track to me in a broad way, but its problematic because it is a mashup of real scientific ideas but the process seems to be more like a philosophical essay. You can't get scientific or engineering progress from philosophy. There are good reasons that most of academia moved on from philosophy.
You can't get scientific progress from philosophy? Wait until you try justify your belief of knowledge without philosophy. The fact is philosophy underpins much of science. You can't just 'move on' from that when it literally forms the foundations. That being said, you might be right about the article itself. Just as you can have bad science, you can have bad philosophy too.
Re: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
#10This is really interesting but I would almost use the word "pseudoscience". I mean a lot of it seems to be on the right track to me in a broad way, but its problematic because it is a mashup of real scientific ideas but the process seems to be more like a philosophical essay. You can't get scientific or engineering progress from philosophy. There are good reasons that most of academia moved on from philosophy.
> There are good reasons that most of academia moved on from philosophy.
There are philosophy departments in almost every reputable University I know...
Everything that is non-STEM is underfunded, it doesn't matter if it is philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, etc. This has nothing to do with academia itself, but with the managerial society we live in, where MBA-types decide on the value of everything with simplistic, dumb and short-sighted economic metrics.
Science absolutely needs philosophy. Science is philosophy. There is not a lot of encouragement to do real science/philosophy these days, because this requires deep thinking and following all sorts of unknown paths. Everything must be justified in terms of what gadgets can be built with the discoveries.
We are going through a profoundly anti-intellectual stage in western culture.