3 ms·
Perhaps a bit of a tangent, but another way I have always perceived relative distances measurements is with the following analogy: You are awake, walking aroun
by KennyCason 10y ago
Perhaps a bit of a tangent, but another way I have always perceived relative distances measurements is with the following analogy:
You are awake, walking around a basketball gymnasium, it's 100x100x100ft. A nice, large room. All other details preserved as well. Surely, our little brains can't contain a 100x100x100ft gymnasium; our little heads would explode trying to fit something so large into it. Yet, when we dream, we are perfectly capable of revisiting this large room in our mind, full spatial properties preserved.
While there are many encoding strategies, looking at how the brain encodes information (or a more simplistic neural network), this gives, in my opinion, a good intuition as to how distance and spatial properties can both differ and relate between two "universes".
You can also observe that our final "view" of the gymnasium is just the surface of the complex underlying thought-structure of the brain. We very much, on a daily basis, only see the surface of what is a very very complex process going on inside the brain.
Perhaps, one may even call that a projection.
- KennyCason 10y agoThere is just so much more to discuss on this subject, including the intricacies of how all events are stored in the brain with cross-connections/relations to other events. Basically, every memory-dimension (time, temperature, happiness, anger, feelings) are all stored in nice gradients with connections to other memories. i.e. The only thing making you think that some past event, yields to some "next" event, is a series of synaptic connections, saying it does. I think the deeper you dig, the more you see how things breakdown from this simple linear view of events happening in your day-to-day life. I'll end here for now at risk of being vague unless asked for further clarity. :)
- veli_joza 10y agoThis reminds me of Kurzweil's explanation of dreaming, as offered in "How to create a mind" book. He claims that during dreaming we experience random, uncoordinated activation of synaptic links and some small portion is recorded in memories. It is only when we recall our dreams that we infuse meaning into them, building a structured and sequential narrative around random stimulus so that our mind can make sense of these memories.
- titzer 10y agoThis is falsified by people who have had interactions with waking people while asleep, conducting conversations and interactions, even if nonsensical. So there is online processing during dreams, not just a "ghost" memory left behind afterwards.