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For 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 t
by PeterisP 5y ago
For 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.