71–80 of 121 posts
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Questions such as these are tackled in the excellent book Infinity and the Mind [0]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Infinity-Mind-Philosophy-Infinite-Pri...
I love these types of books. I'm about to buy this. Is there any reason to get the most recent version (says "with a new preface by the author") over the $2 paperback?
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You should first define what actually means "understanding the brain" before you try to answer this question. Does "understanding of the brain" mean, that we can construct or simulate a brain? An artificial brain, which reproduce our intelligence and consciousness? There is no reason to believe, that we can't do this. A brain is part of our world, governed by physics. However, we will never be able to understand the…
> A brain is part of our world, governed by physics... Sure. But not necessary governed by current physics..
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The brain and consciousness need not be magic for the philosophical issue to arise. The fundamental question is objectivity vs subjectivity. Consciousness is subjective, yet science is an objective affair. Can the objective be used to explain the subjective, or is the objective an abstraction from intersubjective experiences? If it's the latter, then the project to explain everything in scientific terms is doomed, be…
Either consciousness lives in the physical constructs of the human brain or it is supernatural / "magic". If the first case is true, then there is every reason to believe it is open to the scrutiny of the scientific process. What we know for sure is that there are very many scientific questions about the brain that still remain to be answered before we have to throw up our hands and admit that it is all ineffable. IM…
The real challenge here is to understand the brain, and consciousness, without putting it in computer terminology. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
Sorry, but the author of that article clearly does not understand... It doesn't matter if humans store data the way computers do, the point is, that humans can be abstracted as state machines. Yes, humans are certainly different than our PCs today, but that does not mean that the principles are so different. E.g. humans seem to use a lot of lossy 'compression' while that is something we try to avoid in software in re…
Just to clarify, MRI scanner at Cardiff is Siemens Connectom A, a specialized research 3T MRI scanner for which the main designs were part of Human Connectome Project. It is not exactly "hot news", as it is already in research use for several years already (in the US, at MGH). It is, still, however, pretty unique in a way that it was optimized for human in-vivo diffusion MRI (tracing of white matter pathways in alive…
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This might be naive, but I wonder if the essential part of mouse data could be compressed if only we understood it better.
The mouse genome is only 160 megabytes, and contains the instructions for building the brain as well as building everything else, so the "secret sauce" of how to make an intelligent brain should not be extremely large, once you figure out how to do it. :) A lot of the actual connections must be either random, or encoding things the mouse learnt while growing up.
Take a bunch of source code. Compile it, obfuscate it, compress it, and encrypt it with AES such that the result is a 160MB blob. Now see how long it takes to figure out what it does, given a computer that costs a lot of money just to load your program and a long time to give you a result. The upper bound on the complexity of DNA as it relates to the complete expression of an organism phenotype is insanely high.
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This might be naive, but I wonder if the essential part of mouse data could be compressed if only we understood it better.
The mouse genome is only 160 megabytes, and contains the instructions for building the brain as well as building everything else, so the "secret sauce" of how to make an intelligent brain should not be extremely large, once you figure out how to do it. :) A lot of the actual connections must be either random, or encoding things the mouse learnt while growing up.
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6915/full/nature...
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The mouse genome is only 160 megabytes, and contains the instructions for building the brain as well as building everything else, so the "secret sauce" of how to make an intelligent brain should not be extremely large, once you figure out how to do it. :) A lot of the actual connections must be either random, or encoding things the mouse learnt while growing up.
only 160 megabytes Take a bunch of source code. Compile it, obfuscate it, compress it, and encrypt it with AES such that the result is a 160MB blob. Now see how long it takes to figure out what it does, given a computer that costs a lot of money just to load your program and a long time to give you a result. The upper bound on the complexity of DNA as it relates to the complete expression of an organism phenotype is…
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> A brain is part of our world, governed by physics... Sure. But not necessary governed by current physics..
Is there any reason to doubt it?
Is there any reason for the operations of brain to be limited to those involving P' only?