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I think you hit the nail on the head here. The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we

by RIMR 8y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. We designed everything in a smartphone and can say with confidence that it works a certain way, and even explain why. The brain was designed by evolution, and while we mostly understand what it does, we aren't quite sure of the how and why yet.

shkkmo 8y ago
> The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. Perhaps. While the mobile phone might be more complicated than the human brain (I suspect not), that doesn't mean that the human brain is perfectly understandable. The smartphone was designed by a large number of groups that all built and shared abstractions with the express purpose of these being understandable by other groups. The smart phone's design is purposely built to be comprehensible to the human mind. There is no clear reason to expect that there are clean, human friendly abstractions we can make about all the different layers on which the brain inter-operates. To analogize to software, it may be like the difference between diving into well documented code that has: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries and design patterns, hardware agnostic implementation, a modern programming language vs code that was coded by a self-taught developer using design patterns that they made up, employs no separation of concerns and relies on hardware timing and interference quirks. The former may have far more complicated functionality, but still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand.
- Retric 8y ago
  No single person understands how a modern smartphone is built. From the camera optics, transistors, OS, wireless systems, AI, etc it simply covers enough domains to be incomprehensible for a single person. What abstraction provides is a means for organizations to understand it. By comparison DNA is actually a fairly reasonable, program 3 Billion base pairs, but fairly compressible and that’s covering far more than just the brain. But the brain lacks those easily separated chunks, making it harder to decode but not nessisarily more complex.
- p1esk 8y ago
  still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand. All those things you mentioned: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries, etc, are only easier to understand if you already know about them. If you have no clue what a standard library is, what it does, or how it fits in the design, then you're faced with more complexity to understand than a code which implements everything from scratch.

by RIMR 8y ago

shkkmo 8y ago

> The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. Perhaps. While the mobile phone might be more complicated than the human brain (I suspect not), that doesn't mean that the human brain is perfectly understandable. The smartphone was designed by a large number of groups that all built and shared abstractions with the express purpose of these being understandable by other groups. The smart phone's design is purposely built to be comprehensible to the human mind. There is no clear reason to expect that there are clean, human friendly abstractions we can make about all the different layers on which the brain inter-operates. To analogize to software, it may be like the difference between diving into well documented code that has: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries and design patterns, hardware agnostic implementation, a modern programming language vs code that was coded by a self-taught developer using design patterns that they made up, employs no separation of concerns and relies on hardware timing and interference quirks. The former may have far more complicated functionality, but still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand.

Retric 8y ago
No single person understands how a modern smartphone is built. From the camera optics, transistors, OS, wireless systems, AI, etc it simply covers enough domains to be incomprehensible for a single person. What abstraction provides is a means for organizations to understand it. By comparison DNA is actually a fairly reasonable, program 3 Billion base pairs, but fairly compressible and that’s covering far more than just the brain. But the brain lacks those easily separated chunks, making it harder to decode but not nessisarily more complex.
p1esk 8y ago
still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand. All those things you mentioned: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries, etc, are only easier to understand if you already know about them. If you have no clue what a standard library is, what it does, or how it fits in the design, then you're faced with more complexity to understand than a code which implements everything from scratch.