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IIRC, the neural tissue around the gut is near identical to the brain tissue.

by mharig 4y ago

ravi-delia 4y ago
Which bits? I don't have my old notes on hand (I've since switched to less useful and more fun fields), but as I recall the particular structure characteristic of the cortex (really the telencephalon overall) isn't found anywhere else. The gut isn't just sensory stuff, but neither is the eye. There's nontrivial processing done pre-brain in a number of places, but there's no reason to think that cognition is happening elsewhere. I'm not knocking the gut, and I totally get why some neuroscientists talk about its complexity. I actually did some in depth research on it a while back (my advisor had done some related work and I was considering writing a survey paper), and there's a lot of neat stuff going on. It reminded me a lot of early cybernetics peoples' dreams of future factories run by vats of bacteria or something. If you imagine all the various steps of the digestive process, and the production of various chemicals in carefully controlled amounts, you can see why you'd want some serious hardware. Not to mention that there are a large number of muscles which aren't consciously controlled and need to respond quickly to changing circumstances.
- mharig 3y ago
  I do not think cognition is sufficiently understood, to locate it solely in the cortex. The word is even not precisely defined.
  - ravi-delia 3y ago
    I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can pick anything to fall under the umbrella that you want and one of two things will be true; it will happen almost entirely in the brain, or it will also apply to a thermostat/ChatGPT, which means it certainly can't be used to agree with the article above. If we're making specific and unqualified claims about the possibility of "intellegence" without a "body", which is what this thread is about, then there is some working definition at play. I think that under the working definition the article implicitly uses, their argument is extremely dumb. You can pick any definition you want- I certainly can't stop you! But as long as we're arguing about what is and isn't possible without being "embodied", it really doesn't matter. If your definition of cognition is even broader than mine, you should be even less confident that the random researchers the NYT interviewed have correctly identified the exact conditions under which it is possible.

IIRC, the neural tissue around the gut is near identical to the brain tissue.

by mharig 4y ago

IIRC, the neural tissue around the gut is near identical to the brain tissue.

Which bits? I don't have my old notes on hand (I've since switched to less useful and more fun fields), but as I recall the particular structure characteristic of the cortex (really the telencephalon overall) isn't found anywhere else. The gut isn't just sensory stuff, but neither is the eye. There's nontrivial processing done pre-brain in a number of places, but there's no reason to think that cognition is happening elsewhere. I'm not knocking the gut, and I totally get why some neuroscientists talk about its complexity. I actually did some in depth research on it a while back (my advisor had done some related work and I was considering writing a survey paper), and there's a lot of neat stuff going on. It reminded me a lot of early cybernetics peoples' dreams of future factories run by vats of bacteria or something. If you imagine all the various steps of the digestive process, and the production of various chemicals in carefully controlled amounts, you can see why you'd want some serious hardware. Not to mention that there are a large number of muscles which aren't consciously controlled and need to respond quickly to changing circumstances.

mharig 3y ago
I do not think cognition is sufficiently understood, to locate it solely in the cortex. The word is even not precisely defined.
- ravi-delia 3y ago
  I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can pick anything to fall under the umbrella that you want and one of two things will be true; it will happen almost entirely in the brain, or it will also apply to a thermostat/ChatGPT, which means it certainly can't be used to agree with the article above. If we're making specific and unqualified claims about the possibility of "intellegence" without a "body", which is what this thread is about, then there is some working definition at play. I think that under the working definition the article implicitly uses, their argument is extremely dumb. You can pick any definition you want- I certainly can't stop you! But as long as we're arguing about what is and isn't possible without being "embodied", it really doesn't matter. If your definition of cognition is even broader than mine, you should be even less confident that the random researchers the NYT interviewed have correctly identified the exact conditions under which it is possible.