3 ms·

And you're suggesting they do this without storing information? Hmm.

by Freaky 10y ago

panglott 10y ago
The author and several of his sources argue that they do this without internal mental representations of objects.
- ef4 10y ago
  Which is a distinction without a difference. "Information" has a precise meaning. It is easy to design an experiment that proves information is being stored within yourself somewhere. What form it takes hardly matters at all, if we can put bits in and get them back out later, information is being stored, and that is memory. It's obvious that your immune system also stores information. Nobody would really question that -- it's a necessary precondition for vaccines to work. These are information-theoretic memories too. They are all that's required to show that the body computes.
- khedoros 10y ago
  There are pieces of data that I store in some manner (and that would be easier stored in a computer). I'm thinking about phone numbers, addresses, and such. The fact that I can accurately reproduce those pieces of information on demand has to mean that I'm storing them in some way. Are there literally a string of neurons with numbers stamped into them? Certainly not. Is there a cloud of neurons that (along with other, connected information), connects to the clouds representing "me", the concept of a "phone", image and tactile checksum-like data allowing me to recognize my current mobile phone, and a ton of other information? Absolutely. And somewhere in that mess, there's a strong link to a numerical sequence that "feels right" when I access those other neural clouds of concepts. There's something in the physical structure of my brain that encodes various data in a probabilistic, fuzzy, emotionally-connected way, and in a way that will be virtually impossible to identify and understand. The information's still stored.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Comment below you makes powerful counter that there's storage that allows faithful reproduction of stored data. To add to it, I lost most of my memory to a brain injury that destroyed physical elements and reduced interconnections. Result is no recall on all sorts of things. Implies those memories were stored in those connections and physical spaces. The brain has storage for data. It just works differently, is lossy, and connects with other data for compression or reinforcement. This is still storage.
- kbenson 10y ago
  Is that supposed to be evidence for not being a computer? Perhaps someone should introduce the author to Anchor Modeling[1]. Every table with its own attribute, so you don't have an internal representation of objects, just the base attributes and relations, but you can retrieve a representation on the fly. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_modeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_modeling

And you're suggesting they do this without storing information? Hmm.

by Freaky 10y ago

And you're suggesting they do this without storing information? Hmm.

panglott 10y ago

The author and several of his sources argue that they do this without internal mental representations of objects.

ef4 10y ago
Which is a distinction without a difference. "Information" has a precise meaning. It is easy to design an experiment that proves information is being stored within yourself somewhere. What form it takes hardly matters at all, if we can put bits in and get them back out later, information is being stored, and that is memory. It's obvious that your immune system also stores information. Nobody would really question that -- it's a necessary precondition for vaccines to work. These are information-theoretic memories too. They are all that's required to show that the body computes.
khedoros 10y ago
There are pieces of data that I store in some manner (and that would be easier stored in a computer). I'm thinking about phone numbers, addresses, and such. The fact that I can accurately reproduce those pieces of information on demand has to mean that I'm storing them in some way. Are there literally a string of neurons with numbers stamped into them? Certainly not. Is there a cloud of neurons that (along with other, connected information), connects to the clouds representing "me", the concept of a "phone", image and tactile checksum-like data allowing me to recognize my current mobile phone, and a ton of other information? Absolutely. And somewhere in that mess, there's a strong link to a numerical sequence that "feels right" when I access those other neural clouds of concepts. There's something in the physical structure of my brain that encodes various data in a probabilistic, fuzzy, emotionally-connected way, and in a way that will be virtually impossible to identify and understand. The information's still stored.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Comment below you makes powerful counter that there's storage that allows faithful reproduction of stored data. To add to it, I lost most of my memory to a brain injury that destroyed physical elements and reduced interconnections. Result is no recall on all sorts of things. Implies those memories were stored in those connections and physical spaces. The brain has storage for data. It just works differently, is lossy, and connects with other data for compression or reinforcement. This is still storage.
kbenson 10y ago
Is that supposed to be evidence for not being a computer? Perhaps someone should introduce the author to Anchor Modeling[1]. Every table with its own attribute, so you don't have an internal representation of objects, just the base attributes and relations, but you can retrieve a representation on the fly. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_modeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_modeling