Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.“

This is somewhat like an inference from best estimate used to develop a plan and then disregard that and implement the plan. Why the design of your plan is important to get right, because it’s about to be thrown away. There is even a certain trauma or frustration with having to go backwards, unless you’re prepared for it. Have you pulled your hair out on being questioned all the time by passer bys: why are you doing that? Why don’t you do it this way? (Usually best translated as why aren’t you/why don’t you do it my way) By someone who has no conception of the system that produced the implementation plan? Because I am! Grrr! Or you core dump everything on them and you get: sorry I even asked. Or you go along with it only to find later there was a good reason you were doing it the original way and now there’s a lock on the crit path.

This is disregarding the times you’re the one who is wrong.

Which also hints at why logos is hard. Same with debugging. The sanctity of the system that produces the outcomes. Constantly having to remember details. What is happening? Why is it happening? How do you know? How can it be otherwise? Non technical people seem to be able to get away with the first idea that comes to mind, unexamined.

Frameworks, shortcuts, assumptions are developed only at some point to fail you and shoot you right back to first principles. Or you never leave them and the unconcerned dance circles around you. I heard you’ve been having trouble with your tps reports?

Lua indexes from 1 not 0! Are you kidding me!!!? ;_; I went through 5 Adams before I figured that out.

“Professor Henry Jones : Oh, yes. But I found the clues that will safely take us through them in the Chronicles of St. Anselm. Indiana Jones : [pleased] Well, what are they? [short pause as Henry tries to recall] Indiana Jones : Can't you remember? Professor Henry Jones : I wrote them down in my diary so that I wouldn't have to remember. Indiana Jones : [angry] Half the German Army's on our tail and you want me to go to Berlin? Into the lion's den?“

To extend further, is that why don’t touch my stapler? Get out of my chair?

also, consider somebody who is an expert already in the problem domain.

most of us here are programmers and do this on a daily basis. somebody describes "A GraphQL API driven by a clojure back end connected to a postgres database" and to a layperson that looks like either a bunch of nonsense words or maybe a few boxes, clouds, and arrows. but to you and me we can visualize the individual lines of code, configurations, functions, and infrastructural requirements behind that simple sentence.

same with an electrical engineer/inventor in their domain.

It's semantics at this point but we did not create ourselves, it was a complex process that took billions of years to create each one of us. Something being conceivable isn't the same as it being practically possible. I can imagine what you propose, but the same goes for traveling to distant stars or a time machine for going to the future. All perfectly possible in theory.

It is not a contradiction as I meant "achieving" in the context of creating it (through software).

The fact it happened to us is undeniable (from our perspective), but the how/why of it is still one of the many mysteries of the universe - one we will likely never solve.

Exactly. Our tooling doesn't even allow us to make clear inferences about neuronal activity yet - all we can image with fMRI as of today is heamodynamics.

The work proposes that because responses to difference visual stimuli show the same haemodynamic spatiotemporal response in memory areas, the actual memories must share a common representation. This is debatable since we know that localized spatiotemporal responses reflect the variability in the vascular tree and blood flow and volume, regardless of the experiment at hand [see 1 for a discussion]. To dare to claim that effects could be neuronal one needs to run a bunch of extra control experiments (vascular reactivity mapping / breathhold hypercapnic challenges, resting-state imaging as a control dataset), none of which were conducted in the proposed work.

This is known to MR physicists, but hasn't clicked in yet within departments of cognitive neuroscience.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2020.5960...