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Which basically means the brain doesn’t think the way the brain thinks the brain thinks. Aside from the horrible phrasing, it's quite funny to think about, lea
by ElFitz 5y ago
Which basically means the brain doesn’t think the way the brain thinks the brain thinks.
Aside from the horrible phrasing, it's quite funny to think about, leading us to:
My brain thinks it is funny to think about how the brain doesn’t think the way the brain thinks the brain thinks.
In the same way that atoms don’t exactly work the way the atoms think the atoms work since, as Niels Bohr said, "A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
Reminds me of some comment I heard somewhere, about how the brain and the body don’t come with an instruction manual, and how it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: we so far apparently haven’t needed to know how they work to use them well enough to survive.
- PeterisP 5y agoFor me a key insight is that it's not necessarily possible for a brain to understand itself. Obviously there's a certain "capability floor" that a brain needs to have in order to understand a system of some complexity. A rat's brain is capable of understanding some systems, but it's definitely not sufficiently capable to understand a rat's brain. A human brain can understand various systems that are too complex for rats, but it's also finite in it's capabilities - and it's not totally certain that the inherent complexity of how human brains work is small enough to be understandable by human brains; perhaps it would take something more (e.g. brains augmented with tech or biologically enhanced or something totally alien) to properly understand how our brains work.
- ravi-delia 5y agoI see this a lot, but I don't think it's accurate. It's definitely not possible for a brain to completely understand itself, as in know the state of every neuron and how all of those states will evolve over time, but that absolutely doesn't preclude a very complete understanding. The more we learn about the brain, the more it seems it is very friendly to a certain degree of abstraction. If it wasn't it wouldn't be able to turn sense data into world models so well!
- ElFitz 5y agoThat’s what models are for. Many systems are too complex to be fully understood as a whole. But by modelling them, we can still understand why they behaved they they have, and predict how they will behave. There is no need for any one individual to fully grasp a process for it to be modelled. It really is the whole point of modelling.
- d0mine 5y agoFor me it is more mandane: there were times when people thought of human health in terms of 4 elements. [Much] Later they discovered germ theory that uses more useful concepts. Using "memory", "perception" to describe how the brain works is like using 4 elements to describe how our bodies function.
- civilized 5y agoExcept the four element theory was rendered irrelevant by the germ theory. I doubt that understanding the brain will render memory and perception irrelevant. Robots literally have memory and perception (we know because we built them), so clearly these are real phenomena that exist in the real world. It seems to me unlikely that we are totally mistaken in conceptualizing ourselves in terms of these known real phenomena.
- Nav_Panel 5y agoFour element theory is on approximately the same epistemological plane as modern personality psychology. In some ways it's more useful than psychology, because it has a straightforward logic in terms of metaphor and relationships between parts, whereas psychology is a mess. Of course, it has very little to do with how the brain works, but psychology also has very little to do with how the brain works (it's more about the use of language to describe and regulate behavior), so it's not a big deal.
- mrtksn 5y agoWe build robots the way that we think things are supposed to work. It may turn out that our design is fundamentally limited.
- mistermann 5y agoMy intuition is that it isn't totally mistaken, more so that it is a massive simplification. Whereas we seem to describe the brain as having "memory", as if that is something statically stored that is simply "retrieved" (somehow), it seems to me that this overlooks that the device that is doing this is also running an entire virtual model of simulated reality, which can not only remember things, but it can replay them, change variables and play them again, play them in reverse, manufacture completely fictional scenarios, run (as its default) a custom modified variation of "actual" reality that it finds more pleasing (this one has gotten lots of news coverage in the last few years), read the contents of realities running inside other minds (tens of millions if it so chooses), see into the future of "actual" reality, all sorts of different things. "Brains have memory" is a bit of an understatement of what they actually do.
- jraph 5y agoI was annoyed by the phrasing of the submission, which could have been "The way the brain thinks is counter-intuitive" (don't assume I don't know what you are going to tell, or, conversely, that I spent even one second thinking about how the brain thinks), but we probably would not have had the pleasure to read your comment with this title.
- darepublic 5y agoThe title of this post somewhat reminds me of a jira task title
- jraph 5y agoYou are speaking about the editorialized title "Mental Phenomena Don’t Map Into the Brain as Expected", right? Well, yes, I would have titled a bug report exactly this way now that you say it. For reference, the original title is "The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does", this is the one I reacted to.
- jsight 5y agoI'm glad I'm not the only one annoyed by the "it doesn't work the way _you_ think" phraseology. How dare they assume how I think? :) Its a pet peeve, I guess.
- wintorez 5y ago“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”
- robwwilliams 5y agoHmm, but perhaps we could manage to understand the brain and behavior of a fruitfly or even a mouse. The “self-conscious” tier is trivial recursion. Hofstadter has this right in “I Am A Strange Loop”.
- PartiallyTyped 5y agoFunny, I began reading Yudkowsky's "Map and Territory", in the preface there is this sentence: > For if you can't trust your brain, can you trust anything else? Which basically means, if the brain can't trust the brain, can the brain trust another brain? Yes slightly tortured, but only to fit :D
- ElFitz 5y agoHaha! Nice one! We are starting to slide into Cartesian doubt here.