I do not like the lack of actual support in the data for this idea.
Not in developmental science, not in neuroscience. Not in how we understand cellular mechanics to work. Neurons and glial cells are born, grow, die and chemically change all the time.
Psychedelic therapy is in the infancy. Go and run trials before building sand castles of theory.
Most importantly, the testable assumption is what, adding energy would change belief? But of what form and sort? Neurons organize into attractors? Then what do they look like and what's the process? Without that it is woo.
This 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 s…
>Science is philosophy
No. Philosophy does not speak the language of mathematics. Without that tool it's mostly just ego masturbation. I'm not saying it's not interesting, but it's fairly easy for an unusually intelligent person to build cohesive, rational arguments in favor of any arbitrary point. Without some measure of validity philosophers are condemned to continuously argue over the same ideas and assumptions. Philosophy evolved into science when quantifiable validation metrics were introduced. What's more, the hardest and most profound of sciences outside of applied math, physics, simply cannot be advanced without a skilled application of math, without which any amount of essays or books is worthless.
To 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…
Of course, we could use abstraction and analysis to tackle this...
I do not like the lack of actual support in the data for this idea. Not in developmental science, not in neuroscience. Not in how we understand cellular mechanics to work. Neurons and glial cells are born, grow, die and chemically change all the time. Psychedelic therapy is in the infancy. Go and run trials before building sand castles of theory. Most importantly, the testable assumption is what, adding energy would…
Beyond that, I would suggest the most helpful criticism is specific. If you don't agree with something, good to point out exactly what you disagree with. :)
To 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…
Why do people still flock around this argument sometimes, it is so easy to debunk: we already have and are building machines (let's say a complete vechicle, a Tesla Model S) that are already too complex for any individual human to understand all the processes of. There might be engineers who exactly know how a steering works, how the cpu is built, how the chemistry of the tire works, but there is no one who can realistically hold (and operate on) all the knowledge that goes into making such an object. And yet, behold, we are building many of them and they all mostly work, they are functional, stable etc. This is all the type of understanding we need for a brain as well. It already works, why would anyone think that it is impossible?
I do not like the lack of actual support in the data for this idea. Not in developmental science, not in neuroscience. Not in how we understand cellular mechanics to work. Neurons and glial cells are born, grow, die and chemically change all the time. Psychedelic therapy is in the infancy. Go and run trials before building sand castles of theory. Most importantly, the testable assumption is what, adding energy would…
Right. There is no testable assumption. This article is philosophy, which was the precursor to science. They are using an entirely outdated paradigm.
This 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 s…
To see the difference between science and philosophy, compare this article to a reputable scientific paper.
You will see that science includes a testable hypothesis, experiments and/or analysis, and conclusions derived from the data.
> 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 s…
To see the difference between science and philosophy, compare this article to a reputable scientific paper. You will see that science includes a testable hypothesis, experiments and/or analysis, and conclusions derived from the data. This essay contains none of that.
If philosophy is useless, then the good news is that we have no particular reason to believe that testable hypotheses, experiments, and data-derived conclusions are particularly useful either.
Paradigm-shifting ideas. Thanks for posting. Sounds like this could be A New Kind of Science.
For those who don't know, A New Kind of Science is when Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame wrote something like 1000 pages in layman's terms to convince you of his pet theory that the universe is a cellular automaton.
I didn't the hate the book but it was pretty weird and not super scientific.