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The brain's 7D sandcastles could be the key to consciousness (2017)
- krisoft 6y ago"They might even unravel the greatest mystery of them all: consciousness." Don't get me wrong. Brains are interesting. Consciousness is a real puzzler. But... the mass of the known universe is estimated to be about 10^53 kg. In all that mass, there might be a few other mysteries here and there. Believing that the "greatest mystery" is between our two ears feels a tad bit egoistical.
- HPsquared 6y ago"If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Similar thing here. A mystery is a concept which can only occur within human consciousness.
- jcims 6y agoAny time i see an -est superlative in a sciency article i just inject my own ‘known’ or ‘discovered’ as appropriate. Makes everything more palatable.
- chrisweekly 6y agoArguably, the Universe can also only exist within consciousness.
- namero999 6y agoIndeed, this is the next Copernican revolution which can't come soon enough. So many things make much more sense the moment we swap primacy of matter with primacy of consciousness.
- vidarh 6y agoThe distinction is largely moot unless we discover a way to pierce the veil. The strongest argument for modern materialism (in the philosophical sense of the term) is that it doesn't matter if it is true unless we discover a way to observe or interact with something beyond - as long as all we observe is a materialist representation of the world, we have no other meaningful choice than to act as if it is true, because we can but guess at what else might exist and the options are infinite.
- namero999 6y agoI would tend to agree with what you say here, with some clarifications. The first one is that I think it's a matter of _models_. What I mean is that digging under the surface of materialism, what we'll find is pure physics, and currently physics is based on incomplete models or models based on unreachable or non-interactive constructs. Many-universes, 26 dimensions, dark energy, collapse of wave function... Placeholder ideas to make the math work. So, idealism is preaching that there could be the possibility that our current holes in knowledge and understanding might be filled with mind stuff rather than matter stuff. Sure, it might require us to flip the causality relationship between the two, but I don't see that as a fundamentally different way of guessing at what else might exist, and just as materialism has descriptive and predictive power based on abstract, unreachable constructs, so can an idealist worldview. With regards of having to act as if materialism must be true, I would agree but it depends on at which scale we operate. Meaning, I doubt there could be any other functioning paradigm to go about our daily life and to progress practical science. But for things such as "why is there stuff instead of not" or even more tricky questions such as "what's the meaning", I'd look elsewhere.
- jordwest 6y ago> The distinction is largely moot unless we discover a way to pierce the veil. Buddhists might tell you we've already discovered a way to pierce the veil ("enlightenment"). Recently I saw a video of Shinzen Young [0] describing his experience of this, and it sounds a lot like this observation of something beyond. Regardless of whether it's really seeing the nature of reality or just a trick of the brain, I find it fascinating that so many people (throughout history) have very similar [1] experiences and it's given me a lot of motivation to meditate more... [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPnLDtHLymo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPnLDtHLymo [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-does-it-feel-like-to-be-enlightened/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-does-i...
- DennisP 6y agoWithin some consciousness, anyway. There might be others out there.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoumm, yes. Yes it does.
- namero999 6y agoNo, it doesn't. It says 'sound' as opposed to 'a certain amount of air being displaced'. It makes no sound.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound "In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid" "In human physiology and psychology, sound is the reception of such waves and their perception by the brain" I guess it depends on your definition.
- namero999 6y agoI am quite sure the formal definition of sound is something we are all familiar with in here. I would argue that the point of the question is whether there could be sound without the conscious experience of sound. When a tree falls there is definitely displacement of air. Displacement of air though has no intrinsic quality of 'sound-ness'. Such quality can only be experienced by consciousness.
- baddox 6y agoIf you’re redefining the question as “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does anyone hear it?” that is much easier to answer but also much less interesting.
- namero999 6y agoQuite the opposite, actually. What compelled me to tune into this thread was the fact that I've felt the question was being redefined as "if a tree falls, does it displace air or creates any sort of physical effect which we might call sound?" which I find, as I'm sure you do too, easy and uninteresting. I think the question is meant to trigger reasoning on a much more deeper level than that, namely what it is to have a conscious experience and how we should go about defining what is real from that perspective.
- krisoft 6y agoYou couldn't have illustrated my point nicer. Yes it makes a sound. There will be vibrations in the air pressure propagating from the impact. If there are birds around they might take a flight. The ground vibrations will create ripples in the nearby pond which might distract a dragonfly enough that a frog swallows it whole. I understand that I'm taking a Zen koan in the most literal sense, but this the best way I can illuminate the ludicrousness of it. We are not the centre of the everything. Things happen without us. Believing otherwise is as I wrote egoistical, self-centered. There is an unremarkable planet orbiting a regular star a thousand and two light year away from us. On that planet there is a somewhat deer-like species descendant from a prey animal. They are masters of mathematics, philosophy and technology. Their cognition is so advanced that they would only politely smile at the notion that "human consciousness" is the greatest mystery of all. One of them between two ritual playfights took a dust bath on the meadow. It was thinking about the atmosphere of gas giants, when he come up with a question. There is not even a point in trying to explain to humans what the question was. We don't have the capacity to comprehend it. That question was the greatest mystery of all. Pity that they all went extinct before coming to terms with their own inability to find their answer.
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoThing is. Without (any kind of) consciousness, what does it mean for air to propagate and birds to fly? Without it, there is literally nothing.
- marcusestes 6y agoWe can only measure greatness, or the known universe, through the lens of our consciousness, so it seems acceptable to refer back to the nature of the lens as the primary mystery of our experience.
- mistermann 6y agoSome people believe that it is possible to transcend consciousness and improve the lens through which we observe and interpret the world, but I'd say this theory only strengthens your argument.
- so_tired 6y agoThe title and quote are obviously hyperbolic. But A large portion of that mass is in a too high or too low temperature state to support any complexity (I am not a physicist!) On the other hand, a single pound of neurons is more powerful than a warehouse of nano-scale-minituarized silicon. Consciousness itself may or may not be a purely emergent property of this complexity. We already have fairly robust (and simple!) rules for most physical, chemical and biological behaviour. Other than the creation and ending of he universe, Consciousness is certainly a top candidate no ?
- prox 6y agoYes but many things are a mystery beyond consciousness (thanks due to being conscious and able to reason) Like for instance whats beyond the universe? What dimensions are there? Is there a why to its [the universe] coming into being? Is there a what to it? And so on.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago> The title and quote are obviously hyperbolic Are you agreeing, disagreeing or making another point? > On the other hand, a single pound of neurons is more powerful than a warehouse of nano-scale-minituarized silicon Define 'powerful' > Consciousness is certainly a top candidate no ? We literally have no access to 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the rest of the universe[1], so we can't say. Also we are only aware of what we're aware of, they might be greater mysteries under our noses which we've nor realised, or perhaps are literally unable to comprehend. [1] quite possibly hyperbolic
- dang 6y agoI put some spaces in your nines to prevent the comment from borking the page layout. Sorry, it's a bug we're working on.
- AkshatM 6y agoIs there even a measure of greatness that is not anthropocentric? "Greatness" is a compound measure of impact if solved, intractability of the problem, and average tangibility of problem (how much experience a random cross-section of humans would have with the subject of the problem). Consciousness definitely scores high on all three of the criteria.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI don't think so. Why do we have conscious experience, rather than nothing? Why are the 'lights on'? This is a profound question. I don't think it's unreasonable to say it's up there with Why is there something rather than nothing? In a very real sense, nothing matters except consciousness, after all.
- guerrilla 6y agoWe are conscious because it is critical for moving in our environment. You'll noticed that sleeping and anethstetized patients don't do that very well. The brain is for moving. Abstraction and self-consciousness presumably have similar explanations in terms of survival advantages.
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoNotice you did not explain why there needs to be subjective experience. Why do I see the color red? Why am I not some elaborate clockwork that I supposedly am, without inner sensation. I could have none and just describe one to you, but I assure you I actually have one. (Or you are a sollipsist, which is fine) I find that people either understand this immediately or they don't.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> We are conscious because it is critical for moving in our environment. Why? It's clear that intelligence is advantageous, but why consciousness? You've noted that consciousness arises from normal brain activity, similar to how our intelligence does. How? Why? Much of what happens in the brain is unconscious, so why should there be consciousness at all? (As an aside, someone who is asleep is not unconscious in the sense that matters here. If they are dreaming, they are experiencing, i.e. having conscious experiences divorced from the physical world.) Does consciousness arise because of our general intelligence, and our sense of self (both of which make obvious evolutionary sense)? If so, could computers be conscious? Could they suffer? Where's the threshold? Is there any way we could know? Does Rice's theorem apply here? These aren't easy questions. It's an interesting time for philosophy of mind. They aren't solved problems. Anyone who thinks they are, needs to do some reading. For a starting point, the work of David Chalmers is one of the usual recommendations.
- andybak 6y agoI couldn't disagree more. A universe without consciousness to observe it isn't terribly interesting. Furthermore - consciousness is strange enough that is an entirely defensible philosophical position to believe it's the building block of everything else.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago> an entirely defensible philosophical position to believe it's the building block of everything else Could we have a link please?
- namero999 6y agoI would suggest to look into the work of Bernardo Kastrup for a rational argumentation of such topic. A comp-sci PhD, worked at CERN, turned idealist, a second PhD in philosophy, a very lucid and proficient writer.
- morelisp 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism It's literally half of post-Enlightenment western philosophy. Kant, Berkeley, Schopenhauer; artistically Borges; in the sciences Brouwer and Schrödinger; etc.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoNow that is a link. Thank you.
- andybak 6y agoThank you for coming to my defence so perfectly. I might have been tempted to veer off into a discussion about panpsychism (because it's so fascinating) but this is a much stronger example.
- mrfusion 6y agoYet that 10^53 kg only exists between your two ears.
- krisoft 6y agoIf you say so. :)
- nkrisc 6y agoI think it's fair to call it one of the greatest mysteries we're aware of and probably the one that directly affects us the most.
- o_p 6y agoIs the biggest known unknown
- seesawtron 6y agoQuoting Ernest Becker from his The Denial of Death: "In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of words, sounds and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper." "It is natural for a man to strive to be a hero, it goes deeply in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, and yet the society gets chills when someone admits the honesty of it." In academia if you have not convinced yourself that the problem you are working on is "the most" important problem to be worked on, how else would you go on working on it each single day and night with low salary while your counterparts live luxuriously in industry? I think its just a (un)conscious strategy but I can only speak for myself.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agobecause it's not a low salary compared to median? and because you find the work enjoyable and meaningful enough?
- unexaminedlife 6y agoWe are, as far as we know, the first "documented" instance of the universe becoming aware of itself.
- JackFr 6y agoThat 10^53 kg mass, is just an an irregular foam of particles and energy floating in space time. Galaxies, stars, atoms, chemicals exist only insofar as your consciousness names them. Literally everything you can think of owes its existence to your consciousness. I’d say that makes it pretty special.
- o_p 6y agoWouldnt make more sense to try to describe the brain in computational science terms rather than algebraic topology?
- idclip 6y agoDont we already attempt that as AI and NNs? Why not give math a chance too?
- tsimionescu 6y agoNNs, other than being vaguely inspired by it, have nothing to do with the brain or neurons. AI as it stands today also has essentially completely abandoned any idea it may have once had of understanding any aspect of the human brain or cognition, unfortunately. Instead, NNs and AI are entirely focused on the external world and trying to model it for strictly practical purposes (trying to predict aspects of it, in general).
- DennisP 6y agoFiguring out patterns in the way neurons communicate with each other seems pretty sensible. Maybe it can help us figure out what algorithm the brain is actually running.
- cortic 6y ago>[what is..]consciousness Isn't this an answered question? Consciousness is the sensation we get when we point our ability to predict others actions back on itself. The inverse of putting our-self in someone else's shoes. This was scientifically confirmed by both the decision delay experiments, as well as brain imagery that showed the same circuitry activate whether you ask someone why they did something; or why someone else did something. That is not to say all the secrets of the brain have been understood or uncovered, but this seems to be searching for a more feel-good answer to a question that has largely been answered.
- devnull255 6y agoTo playfully tease, this is exactly what a Flatlander might say. But while you describe the behavior of consciousness, the article describes its other aspects: its shapes, how neurons collaboratively make it and how it is unmade. This not searching for a more feel-good answer, it is a search for deeper understanding which is what science is all about anyway.
- cortic 6y agoI accept the rebut. There maybe a deeper understanding to consciousness that is not obvious from our perspective. Still, calling this the 'greatest mystery of them all' feels disingenuous, as there may not be a mystery.
- baddox 6y agoGenerally we are asking for more information than a definition when we ask “what is something?” Humans knew that “the stars” were those little points of light in the night sky long before we knew much about their composition or evolution.
- zxcmx 6y agoThis still leaves the core problem - how does anyone (or anything) experience anything at all?
- polishdude20 6y ago
- uniqueid 6y agoI didn't understand the article at all, but it did make think about about how many dimensions are required for humans to understand how objects in life relate to each other. I counted: a point, a line, a plane, a solid, a solid at a point in time, a solid that might exist in some possible future, and a solid at a point in time that might have existed if our past had been different. That's all I could come up with (and I'm not even sure if the last one is a dimension). It's probably a coincidence (there's nothing crankier than numerology), but it did make me happy that it adds up to seven.
- echelon 6y ago> I counted: a point, a line, a plane, a solid, a solid at a point in time, a solid that might exist in some possible future, and a solid at a point in time that might have existed if our past had been different. A solid in some parallel universe. A solid in some fictitious parallel universe. A solid in some non-cannon fictitious universe. A solid thinking of another solid in some parallel universe derived by combining one of more non-cannon offshoots of a particular fictitious universe combined with our own but also exploring and deconstructing revisionist history themes. All of that, but also the main character is revising her schema to be in fifth normal from. That's kind of arbitrary, but I'm sure it regularly happens on fanfictiction.net Just because picturing geometry in more than three dimensions is hard, doesn't mean we can't grapple with dimensionality or abstraction. We're pretty good at it.
- kohtatsu 6y agoI think we limited "Math" to the wrong things in school.
- jerf 6y agoIn the sense being used by the original article, those are not dimensions. That is a very scify type of dimension, which has no known real-world referent. The original list goes wrong at "a solid that might exist in some possible future"; that is not a dimension. That is simply a solid with a time value in the future, which is the same four dimensions as the preceding example. A dimension is an additional necessary number to characterize a system. Beyond the location inside a point (0 numbers required), a line (1 number required), a plane (2 numbers required), and a full 3D space (3 numbers required), examples of real world entities that require more than three dimensions are: A RGBA color value, which is four-dimensional. The location and orientation of a rigid object; 6 dimensional. Three for the location, three additional for the rotation. The location, velocity, orientation, and spin rate of a rigid object: 12 dimensional. In addition to the previous six, three new ones needed for the translational vector and three new ones needed for each spin axis rate. Any arbitrary multiple of three: Any RGB image, where each pixel is three dimensions each, one for R, G, and B. Images get to be high-dimensional spaces very quickly. High numbers of dimensions are hard to visualize, but they are completely bereft of any "woo woo" value or any of the sort of mystery one might be inclined to ponder on illegal substances. Bog-standard examples of such things are encountered on a daily basis; the state of the display you are reading this on is characterized by a several-million-component vector. That's how "boring" and "normal" such things are. If you've got any of the woowoo in your concept of "dimension", you don't understand dimensionality. The bad news is that this may take away the vague fuzzy fun of pondering the meaningless concept; the good news is that this opens you to much more concrete and real, and still quite mysterious, fun of pondering real high dimensionality spaces, which is a much richer and more interesting space that has enough stuff to explore for the rest of your life, were you so inclined. The "woo woo" scify concept is exhausted in five minutes, or perhaps a drug-fueled trip. It may feel fun for a moment but it doesn't go anywhere.
- plutonic 6y agoPerhaps I am missing something, but the use of dimensionality in this article seems a bit overblown. The article says that a digraph meant to represent a rat brain formed 8-cliques in response to some input data. You could represent this 8-clique as a 7D structure ... but not necessarily. I am a bit worried that a layperson will read the article and think that the human brain is literally 7D in some actual way
- ReactiveJelly 6y agoA lot of laypeople are already mixing up "dimension" with "universe". "In an alternate dimension... thousands of different dimensions..."
- PH01 6y agoI struggled to find the meat in this article and a quick google of the terms involved only really brings back the same article, which is almost 3 years old now. On top of that the story is a cookie cutter rewrite of every upcoming ML/math technique which are always poised to provide some amazing insight into the human mind. A more honest title would be "algebraic topologists think algebraic topology is great, academics who have employed algebraic topologists want it to be great but don't really understand it". Edit: for anyone looking for the actual meat this appears to be it: Objective Morphological Classification of Neocortical Pyramidal Cells (2019) https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/29/4/1719/5304727 https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/29/4/1719/5304727
- Waterfall 6y agoYou seem interested in this subject, I found this to be very interesting. tl;dr they may wake people out of comas with psychedelics. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.0002...
- dr_dshiv 6y agoIsn't a another dimension simply another column in the table?
- zitterbewegung 6y agoYes, and if you have a set of tables (observations) you have a tensor.
- archibaldJ 6y agotldr: researchers build computational models of mice's brains then study the models through methods of algebraic topology e.g. looking at artificial neural cliques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_clique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_clique) up-closed i.e. at a level of detail unobtainable with an actual slice of brain tissue, and measuring their dimensionalities Here are the stuff the project published so far: https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/blue-brain/publications/ https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/blue-brain/pu...
- seesawtron 6y agoToo late to the thread but I will give it a shot. First of all, the Blue Brain Project (equivalent of the US Human Brain Project) has been widely criticised within the neuroscience community for its failures to invest the funding appropriately [0,1] as well as failing to produce their exaggerated claims of "brain on a computer", even 3 years after this article was published. Secondly, it is insanely hard to even map in all the connections between neurons with their thousands of synapses. Imagine one neuron connects to another 1000 neurons and a cubic millimeter of mouse cortex contains about 9×10^4 neurons. Even 1mm3 of cortex hasn't been mapped yet for a rodent (mouse/rat) brain. Mapping the whole rodent brain will easily take another decade [2]. Thirdly, even when you have mapped the complete brain, inferring states of consiousness from it is a far fetched hypothesis and most neuroscients don't even dare to go there because it is so absurd to talk about it from incomplete simulation models. Given the complexity of wiring of neurons and the sheer amount of specific nature of this wiring, building simulation models assumes that the connections between neurons are totally random which is an age old view which computational neuroscientists are now starting to accept (except the BBP, for now). Contrary to the BBP simulation models, this [3] model actually pays attention to the observed wiring from past experiments and is the closest to anything "realistic" but of course with several caveats. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain-project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-bra... [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/ten-years-human-brain-project-simulation-markram-ted-talk/594493/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/ten-year... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31055238/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31055238/ [3] https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006535#abstract1 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
- Waterfall 6y agoThis doesn't have that much substance in the article. I hope that you haven't heard of the entropic theory of the brain, its one of the most fascinating theories and its very exciting! https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.0002... https://mind-foundation.org/entropy-as-more-than-chaos/ https://mind-foundation.org/entropy-as-more-than-chaos/
- dmix 6y ago> these transient structures, which appear and disappear like sandcastles on a beach That's a good metaphor for building up elaborate programming concepts in your brain then someone bothers you and it slips away. So you have to sit quietly and build it back up (quicker this time).