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So what is the brain if not just matter?
by krisoft 8y ago
So what is the brain if not just matter?
- jcoffland 8y agoI agree. It's likely just matter. But we still don't know everything about matter.
- fungiblecog 8y agoAt the scale of the brain we do.
- pdkl95 8y agoSean Carroll explaining why "the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood". (renormalization group, pair production at human energy scales) https://youtu.be/Vrs-Azp0i3k?t=2046 https://youtu.be/Vrs-Azp0i3k?t=2046 (this specific explanation starts at 34:06, but earlier parts are worth watching if anybody wants a nice introduction to the Standard Model and QFT)
- pas 8y agoThe threshold is protein folding. Anything lower level than that is noise, but folding itself is important, as it can go wrong sometimes and kill you. (Prions.) And things can be approximated, sometimes very close to the real thing. Hence the connectome. Synapses are the interconnects and neurons are tiny networks of very simple computers on their own. And it's not "just" pattern matching, it's very very likely Turing complete. (You can do counting networks, you can do conditionals, you don't really need anything else to learn, match, execute simple programs.) We know enough to claim that it's increasingly unlikely that we are missing any relevant physical phenomena for understanding the brain and the mind. (So no quantum woo is required.) Sure, it that unlikeliness is not zero, and it might turn out that some kind of quantum effect is important for some very strange step in the workings of the brain, but even then it's very likely that we can classically model it with good approximation. (Because as others mentioned, energy scales, and other fundamental things constrain any process going on there.)
- red75prime 8y agoIf there's no god who prohibits connecting immaterial parts to anything but human brain, then it's a technical problem.
- red75prime 8y agoSorry, misread your question as "So what if the brain is not just matter?"