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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 c
by s-macke 9y ago
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 thought process down to each individual activation of the neuron.
That's like trying to "understand" and follow the movement of each atom in my coffee next to me.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- criddell 9y ago> However, we will never be able to understand the thought process down to each individual activation of the neuron. Is that true in general, or are you specifically talking about human brains?
- s-macke 9y agoI mean a complex thought process. Like how to come from an activated retina cell to a movement to a part of a body. At time index 586578382342us the cell no 15547349 got activated which led to a slightly improved electric charge around the axon of neuron no 68342. The connection strength, as you remember, from time index 3870127106 is now 1% higher ..... one billion pages later ..... but the atom here is slightly misaligned to its counterpart, ...... one billion pages later .... noise coming from dentride no 496839 .... one billion pages later .... let to a decreased potential at muscle cell no 9678402 and hence a millimeter shift of the finger tip no 3. ...... Do you want to here the exciting story about my semimenbranous muscle at time index 4386702121us :) Do we understand the brain when we have this information? What I want to say is, that our brain cannot store so much information and handle it. Hence, we cannot "understand" the brain on this level. ("The person did this, because .... ")
- giblaz 9y agoUnless you can build a time machine. Sci-fi is foiled again!
- fdej 9y agoWell, we could in principle build a computer capable of this level of understanding, and then use a brain-computer interface to augment our own understanding with the computer's...
- sp332 9y agoBut the computer you're using is already a few billion transistors running at a few billion ticks per second. Just because the behavior is super complex doesn't mean we can't understand what gives rise to the complexity at some useful level of abstraction.
- jacquesm 9y agoIf you've spent enough time at the lowest level of gigahertz clocked hardware you know that you'll never be able to even map a single second of a modern computers execution in a lifetime. You will always have to deal with simplification and approximation, which means you might miss a crucial detail. Finding a bug is usually starting from a very high degree of knowledge about the designed function of the system and verifying at ever higher resolution that it actually performs according to those designed parameters. That's different from trying to understand what a computer does starting from an electron micrograph of the chips and not having access to the software or the wiring diagram. That might lead to useful insights but it wouldn't be understanding.
- terryf 9y agoExactly - consciousness is clearly an emergent phenomena of these kinds (and possibly other kinds) of interactions in your brain due to the large scale. In order to reason about the emergent phenomena, you have to "zoom out" - look at bigger pieces, not the individual atoms or neurons. The tricky part here is that it seems that there is no particular reason for the bigger pieces to be separated into easy to reason about "modules". It could of course be the case, but I don't really see the evolutionary advantage between a "mess of wires" that works well enough and a system that is modularised. So, if the brain is a modularised system, then there is hope of understanding it, as you can understand a computer that another commenter mentioned as well. But, if not, then it might be the case that indeed a human brain will not be able to understand it by itself. If there is an underlying structure that's just intermixed with the other parts, then perhaps with the help of computers we can separate them logically. There is of course the possibility that modularisation is simply not possible, because of (almost) full connectedness and interactions. Mr Penrose for example suggests the case of quantum entanglement leading to consciousness and if that really is the case, then there is essentially no way to "understand" why a certain decision was reached by the brain.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago>There is no reason to believe, that we can't do this. A brain is part of our world, governed by physics. How do you know consciousness is "governed" by our contemporary understanding of physics?
- aswanson 9y agoBecause the brain is composed of physical matter which obeys the laws of physics.
- jnicholasp 9y ago> Because the brain is composed of physical matter Is consciousness?
- louithethrid 9y agoYes, the process that makes conciousness is also governed by physics.
- jnicholasp 9y ago> the process that makes conciousness is also governed by physics. How do you know that this is true?
- Alain-lf 9y agoBecause, as far as we can tell, everything that is part of our universe is governed by physics. Our brains are part of this universe, and conciousness is dependent on our brains.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago>everything that is part of our universe is governed by physics. Roughly 68% of the observable universe cannot be explained by physics ("dark matter").
- babyrainbow 9y ago> A brain is part of our world, governed by physics... Sure. But not necessary governed by current physics..
- FeepingCreature 9y agoIs there any reason to doubt it?
- babyrainbow 9y agoImagine the whole domain of physics to be P and our current knowledge to be a subset of it, P'. Is there any reason for the operations of brain to be limited to those involving P' only?
- GolDDranks 9y agoThere is. It's called quantum field theory. QFT has the peculiar property that the interactions between elementary particles in it are symmetric in space and time. What that means, is that if an exotic particle is capable of interacting with some of the commonly known everyday particles, which we know the brain is made of, we are also capable of producing that exotic particle using our common, everyday particles. That means that if exotic particles exist, they interact with the everyday particles very weakly - otherwise we would've already produced them in the LHC. That means that even if exotic particles existed, they wouldn't have a practical effect on everyday matter, and thus, to our brain. This all, of course, lies on the assumption that the symmetry property of QFT is correct. It's very likely to be (at least in everyday conditions, such as in a slab of fat in 37 C heat bath) – after all, QFT is the most experimentally precise scientific theory ever discovered in the history of science.
- babyrainbow 9y agoSorry. Couldn't make sense of most of your comment. Can you explain how these exotic particles is relevant at all?