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Brain implant translates paralyzed man's thoughts into text with 94% accuracy

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Re: Brain implant translates paralyzed man's thoughts into text with 94% accuracy

#221

Interesting that the user has to think of specific letters to spell out a word. I guess the 26 distinct English letters are much easier to parse and separate than the untold thousands of words, especially when those words could be used in different contexts. I bet the next step wouldn't be to even parse words to make a sentence. It seems to me the next low hanging fruit would be to enable this machine to parse common…

hmm, I wonder what would be the fastst method wether teaching it the idea of "good morning" or the words "good" and "morning"

I would imagine eventually you would end up with system where less common words or complex nuanced ideas would need spelled out and commonly used thought words or sentences could be recognized.

Re: Brain implant translates paralyzed man's thoughts into text with 94% accuracy

#222
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How or where did you acquire such specific beliefs about what minds can or cannot do?

My skepticism probably comes in part from an anti-religion, anti-mystic reflex. There’s a lot of woo around this stuff so it often puts me on guard. Obviously nobody is claiming psychic powers here, but I wouldn’t expect brains to operate that differently - so it’s surprising to me.

Maybe it's similar to how an artificial neural network can converge to different local optimums for a particular problem, depending on its initial parameters and training method. Our brains might just find different ways of representing thoughts, be it through words, images, sounds or even just abstract concepts. If none of them are strictly better than all the others, then there's no selective pressure for the brain to prioritize development in one specific direction over others.
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