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The Human Brain: Even Basic Facts Are Hotly Contested
- KingFelix 8y agoYes. So many scientists, so many biases, much still to discover/understand. I wonder if we will be able to find some solid info on what's going on. I like Jeff Hawkins discussion surrounding this idea, or David Chalmers idea of the hard problem. We have tons of info/facts about what's happening in the brain physiologically, locations of things, neutral pathways, etc. We don't have a grasp on consciousness though. But, Chalmers, Hawkins, Dennet, ...... All have strong beliefs. It's a curious fundamental mystery, and so wonderful.
- acqq 8y agoNot a mystery at all, unless you start with the premise of the "Human Exceptionalism" and as jolux rightfully points here, the publisher Discovery Institute has even a whole department called "the Center on Human Exceptionalism." That's how they start from the false premise and come to the false confirmation of that false premise with a religious answer that it's "a mystery." Interestingly, the editor of this particular publication writes in his article that he is aware that one doesn't have to start from such a false premise, but that they go "way beyond this": https://mindmatters.ai/2018/07/why-mind-matters-matters/ https://mindmatters.ai/2018/07/why-mind-matters-matters/ "Consciousness, for example, is defined in the dictionary as being aware of your surroundings. A robot with environmental sensors is conscious by this definition. In our discussions, the topic of AI consciousness is way beyond this." At least he doesn't use in that text the direct "it's a mystery" approach. But looking at the titles of the articles there where he's an editor we see: "Possible Minds?: But What If the Minds Are Impossible?" "New Evangelical Statement on AI is Balanced and Well-Informed " "Why Apes Are Not Spiritual Beings" "Things Exist That Are Unknowable" Etc.
- egjerlow 8y agoHere we go again :)
- jolux 8y agoThis is a publication of the Discovery Institute, a politically conservative think tank which advocates intelligent design and has a department called the Center on Human Exceptionalism.
- pfortuny 8y agoWell yes. However the experiment they talk about was made with rats.
- acqq 8y agoAnd with rats they conclude the title "The Human Brain: Even Basic Facts Are Hotly Contested"? It's enough to see the other titles of their articles to see their agenda: "Human Exceptionalism." And "intelligent design."
- eli_gottlieb 8y agoAh, all right, flagged then. And here I'd been hoping to read an interesting discussion on basic disputes about brain function.
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- Veedrac 8y agoTo those who haven't yet read the article, don't bother. Here's a 15-second rendition of the argument to save you the time: A rat study showed most of a rat brain was used to process information from touch. This does not match ‘function localization’ models of the brain, and might be relevant to brain injury outcomes. There is also debate to what extent, if any, neuron growth happens in adulthood. Therefore we should be suspicious about neuromorphic computation and maybe the brain isn't substrate independent. No, I'm not skipping a step with ‘therefore’, it really is precisely that abrupt, arbitrary, and poorly-reasoned.
- untilHellbanned 8y agoWhat’s neurotrophic computation and substrate independence?
- AllegedAlec 8y ago> Substrate independence If I recall my terms correctly, substrate independence is the idea that creating intelligence is not dependent on using neurons, but that if you could model the required functionality of neurons in another substrate, an intelligence could also be housed in that substrate. > Neuromorphic computing Is basically modelling neurological architectures in computers.
- Veedrac 8y agoNeuro-morphic, having the form of neurons. Recently the buzz refers to circuits that perform neural network operations (the AI kind) using hardware properties directly, storing weights and performing inference or backprop with the computing substrate, which is potentially more efficient or faster than using SRAM and multipliers. It can also refer to hardware directly attempting to model biological neurons, which is more far-field research than the former. Substrate independence denotes a property being separable from its physical implementation. One could say Alan Turing showed that computation is substrate independent, since many machines all do the same sort of computation. It's often debated whether consciousness is substrate independent, whether a piece of silicon just simulating a human brain will actually have an internal experience of its own thoughts. People who believe in souls, dualism, or panpsychism tend to think it isn't (to different degrees), people who believe in reductionism or emergentism tend to think it is. The authors of this piece go so far as to say the stuff the brain does might not even be reproducible outside of flesh-and-blood, regardless of whether such a reproduction would have internal experience.
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- le-blurter 8y agoAh, ah, ahhhhhh. Naughty, naughty. You aren’t supposed to question the submissions or their ranking. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
- IshKebab 8y agoThis article is rather confused. First, just because processing is distributed doesn't mean that there aren't different areas of the brain that are more involved in certain things. The visual cortex is pretty clearly for vision for example. Second, they seem to be saying that AI is not like the brain because it is a "switch" (what?) and doesn't have distributed processing/representations like the brain? Or something? It's hard to know what they're trying to say because it doesn't make any sense.
- agildehaus 8y agoIf you scroll to the bottom of the page, you'll see this is sponsored by "Discovery Institute". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute So no surprise it's a confused article.
- ptah 8y agothis article is a massive waste of time. most AI researchers acknowledge that neural networks don't match the way the brain works
- Conjoiner 8y agoso those researchers can skip reading the article, the rest of us may like it
- return1 8y ago> Thus they determined that the brain does not operate like a set of switches, as we used to think Nobody thinks that. Not even in neuroscience. Karl Lashley's experiments with cats happened well before the 50s and he concluded that there is no specific place where memories and learning are formed. We know that some areas specialize in mainly doing one thing or another
- simonh 8y agoNote the sneaky non sequitur at the end, which of course this being the Discovery Institute was the whole point of the article: >Maybe it’s worse than they fear. Perhaps the brain doesn’t and can’t operate like a piece of machinery at all. And vice-versa. Just because the brain may not work like an 'ideal' neural network running in a computer simulation, that doesn't in any way say that it couldn't be duplicated using a non-'ideal' neural network simulation. It may just mean we need to adjust the form of the simulation.
- winter_blue 8y agoYou’re implicitly suggesting that the brain “operates like a piece of machinery” and that we just need to adjust the form of “simulation”. The problem with this is that you’re also implying that the brain (and human mind) is a deterministic system. The implication of determinism is that everything is predictable. Given a set of inputs, in a deterministic system whose rules we fully know, the output is entirely predictable. We could extend this determinism to the whole universe, and reduce the universe into a pure function 'f' with a some specific initial state 'x'. Starting with f(x), for every unit quantization of time, f is applied on its previous result --- f(f(f....f(x)....))). And that's reality. (If you believe in a Big Crunch / Big Bang cycle, the output of 'f' at some point cycles back to the original 'x'.) The initial state 'x', and the definition of the universe function 'f' _is_ existence -- the totality of all that is. I don't have any proof that we are not living in a deterministic universe, but all I can say is that, philosophically, I find the idea of determinism to be extremely upsetting. It empties life of any meaning. Why even continue living if everything you do was pre-programmed at the beginning of the universe? Determinism implies that the values of 'f' and 'x' could be blamed for the Holocaust. Moral responsibility becomes meaningless, because everything is pre-programmed. I think a lot of people, if they deep-down believed in this sort of mechanical determinism, they would sink into a very deep deep depression. I struggled with this myself, as a teenager—and I’ve emphatically rejected human mind determinism. Believing in free will on the other hand, is very empowering. Believing in the concept of free will can in and of itself imbue one's life with a certain degree of meaning, purpose and drive. It means what you choose to do, matters. Life is meaningful; we’re not just empty automatons executing our pre-programmed futures under illusion of choice / free will. We are sentient beings with free being. From the point of view of physics, I think free will in biological organisms will eventually be proven to some degree. The fact that in the last century, practically every physicist has come to accept that there's a lot of unpredictable behavior in matter, that cannot be deterministically predicted, and can only be described with probability distributions, has been very reassuring. My theory is that free will emanates from somewhere in these probability distributions, and is amplified in living organisms.
- sadness2 8y agoSomething working with neural networks has helped me to come to terms with is that we are probabilistic creatures, and even things we call facts are things we simply feel very confident about. Science itself is a process of increasing confidence in an outcome, not an exercise in certainty.
- zakk 8y agoThe fact that an artificial neural network (which very roughly mimics human brain) is probabilistic in nature does not have any implication for Science as a whole. Science can make predictions that are extremely accurate (think ten significant digits) and the uncertainty on that prediction (i.e. the eleventh significant digit) does not have anything to do with neural networks or us being "probabilistic creatures", whatever that means.
- sadness2 8y agoEven in your ideal experimental scenario, the laws of probability state that before the 10,000,000,000th such study is completed, we will see a case where the findings turn out to be incorrect. We learn by experience, and we build weightings, and both our gut reactions and careful conclusions are simply the ones which win the confidence ratings. Logic may be an exception by virtue of it's mathematical nature, but any facts involved are not, and we fall back on judgement calls most of the time even when we think we're being logical.
- zakk 8y ago> Even in your ideal experimental scenario, the laws of probability state that before the 10,000,000,000th such study is completed, we will see a case where the findings turn out to be incorrect. And yet by means of statistics one can model the errors, and obtain an experimental measurement with 10 significant digits. And, guess what, it agrees with the theory! Ten. Significant. Digits. > Logic may be an exception by virtue of it's mathematical nature, but any facts involved are not, and we fall back on judgement calls most of the time even when we think we're being logical. That's not how Science works.
- caprese 8y ago> The experiment, conducted on anesthetized rats, may help us understand brain injury better Maybe anesthetized rats process stimuli extremely differently, as the brain tries to determine location of input