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"A final obstacle that stops us from filling each other’s buckets with wisdom: it might kill us. If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal

by dmbche 3y ago

"A final obstacle that stops us from filling each other’s buckets with wisdom: it might kill us. If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing. The human brain does not have Terminal, for good reason. If you could muck around with your own source code, you could suddenly make your lungs stop working, or destroy your ability to see blue, or get yourself sexually attracted to birds. That’s why you have to wall it off, so that neither you nor anyone else can break your brain." I like this idea - reminds me of hearing of sci-fi stories where even cursory communication with aliens is catastroohic because they share knowledge we are not meant to know and destroy ourselves because of it. And the comment of someone(?) on TV being bad for children because it gives them answers to questions they wouldn't have asked. Talk is cheap, but maybe we should be a little careful, and most of all careful of what we listen to.

joelfried 3y ago
If you haven't read it, the book you haven't realized you're looking for is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
- dmbche 3y ago
  Will do, thank you!
- vdqtp3 3y ago
  I'd say Lexicon by Max Barry is even more applicable
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Also, the Animorphs series. Mind you, they're not children's books, rather, they're books about children, in all sorts of horrifying situations.
im3w1l 3y ago
It's really amazing to me how instinctive behavior works and what that reveals about how the brain works. Like an instinctive behaivor would need an instinctive pathway from stimulus to processing to motor response. In order for such a thing to work properly there must be hardcoded protocols along that entire path - i.e. not learnt. There may be some limited local learning along the way, for instance the input pipeline may learn to tune out some defects or noise. Another interesting point is that our conscious minds can interact in some limited ways with our instincts, it can be influenced by being put in a certain emotional state, and it can to some extent suppress or override the natural response, e.g. not flinching away from pain. Thus at the boundaries the conscious mind must also speak these common protocols. Then it follows that reinforcement learning in the brain is quite limited in where it happens.
- dmbche 3y ago
  I read somewhere that some believe consciousness to have arisen from paradoxical wants (i.e. not dropping something hot to accomplish a task). I just remembered hearing on joe rogan maybe 10 years ago about delta wave (?) training, where someone would have their delta waves monitored while watching a movie for example. When the waves got outside optimal range the movie would begin to stutter and buffer until the waves got back into optimal range. It was said to be efficient - and it's effectively training your subconcious. This might also interest you https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    It seems like, if was making you aware of a problem and then having you deliberately deal with it, it was training your conscious.
    - dmbche 3y ago
      The effects kept going after the training, and you made no conscious effort to change the waves, the discomfort from the stuttering was driving the brain to lower delta waves. This is all from a JRE podcast years back, so I'm probably wrong, but I think the logic was that this could be applied to other subconcious processes (like regulating your heartbeat to stay in some optimal value, or the serotonin levels in the brain), and that the effects were not conscious. Kind of setting a new normal for yourself.
nico 3y ago
We do have “Terminal access” to our minds It just requires either taking some sort of substance or a lot of practice with something like meditation, yoga or holotropic breathing So it is pretty walled off as it requires either a special key or brute force, but it is not inaccessible
- LibertyBeta 3y ago
  I feel like we should make a comment here about you're not in the sudor's wheel.
  - aorloff 3y ago
    If a poweruser doesn't put themselves in wheel, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?
  - rednerrus 3y ago
    Physical access is root access.
    - colonelpopcorn 3y ago
      Opening up the "case" requires disconnecting the "computer" from "power". Since we haven't figured how to get "the power" going again once it's off this analogy is kind of worthless.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    Or maybe that you can only interact with everything in bash, so not the most fine grained control. Or if instead of text all you had were emojis.
fzeindl 3y ago
This is also the reason why self-improvement, changing any behaviors no matter if it's about procrastination, sports or mental health takes so long and is so tiresome. If the brain could be changed easily it would be very unstable and humanity might have died out very fast.
qawwads 3y ago
>If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing. This is what they told us in computer class back then to make sure we don't learn anything wortwhile. Reading it on HN of all place makes me very sad.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Why is the only way to learn something worthwhile about a computer to poke blindly at the terminal? Experimentation is a healthy component of learning, but that doesn't make it the only component of learning. Preferably, you at least learn enough about the computer beforehand to know what you risk messing up and roughly how long it might take to get back to the previous state so you can experiment more than once. At that point you "really know what you're doing".
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    GP is right in that "fear of screwing up" is a huge blocker in learning computers. It's really hard to screw anything up so badly that you can't recover by reinstalling the OS / factory-resetting the device, worst-case losing some data and a few hours of your time. But with brains, well, every such screw up would be debilitating or fatal to the person whose brain sits at the other end of your REPL.
    - dmbche 3y ago
      Just a thought - I'm realising that I internalised this fear with computers, having been raised with this idea that they are "easy to screw up, better not to look inside". It was fair when we had a computer room and a family computer, but since you can buy a second hand laptop for less than 50$, and as you said can solve most issues very easily, it is not warranted at all. Edit: I'm fine now, I used to be on Arch btw
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
elesiuta 3y ago
> "or destroy your ability to see blue" This also reminds me of the McCollough effect [1] which can affect your perception of colorless gratings for an unexpectedly substantial amount of time afterwards just by starting at some images. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect
joebiden2 3y ago
> The human brain does not have Terminal (sic) It has, and lots of people are accustomed to it :)

by dmbche 3y ago

joelfried 3y ago

If you haven't read it, the book you haven't realized you're looking for is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

dmbche 3y ago
Will do, thank you!
vdqtp3 3y ago
I'd say Lexicon by Max Barry is even more applicable
satvikpendem 3y ago
Also, the Animorphs series. Mind you, they're not children's books, rather, they're books about children, in all sorts of horrifying situations.

im3w1l 3y ago

It's really amazing to me how instinctive behavior works and what that reveals about how the brain works. Like an instinctive behaivor would need an instinctive pathway from stimulus to processing to motor response. In order for such a thing to work properly there must be hardcoded protocols along that entire path - i.e. not learnt. There may be some limited local learning along the way, for instance the input pipeline may learn to tune out some defects or noise. Another interesting point is that our conscious minds can interact in some limited ways with our instincts, it can be influenced by being put in a certain emotional state, and it can to some extent suppress or override the natural response, e.g. not flinching away from pain. Thus at the boundaries the conscious mind must also speak these common protocols. Then it follows that reinforcement learning in the brain is quite limited in where it happens.

dmbche 3y ago
I read somewhere that some believe consciousness to have arisen from paradoxical wants (i.e. not dropping something hot to accomplish a task). I just remembered hearing on joe rogan maybe 10 years ago about delta wave (?) training, where someone would have their delta waves monitored while watching a movie for example. When the waves got outside optimal range the movie would begin to stutter and buffer until the waves got back into optimal range. It was said to be efficient - and it's effectively training your subconcious. This might also interest you https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  It seems like, if was making you aware of a problem and then having you deliberately deal with it, it was training your conscious.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    The effects kept going after the training, and you made no conscious effort to change the waves, the discomfort from the stuttering was driving the brain to lower delta waves. This is all from a JRE podcast years back, so I'm probably wrong, but I think the logic was that this could be applied to other subconcious processes (like regulating your heartbeat to stay in some optimal value, or the serotonin levels in the brain), and that the effects were not conscious. Kind of setting a new normal for yourself.

nico 3y ago

We do have “Terminal access” to our minds It just requires either taking some sort of substance or a lot of practice with something like meditation, yoga or holotropic breathing So it is pretty walled off as it requires either a special key or brute force, but it is not inaccessible

LibertyBeta 3y ago
I feel like we should make a comment here about you're not in the sudor's wheel.
- aorloff 3y ago
  If a poweruser doesn't put themselves in wheel, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?
- rednerrus 3y ago
  Physical access is root access.
  - colonelpopcorn 3y ago
    Opening up the "case" requires disconnecting the "computer" from "power". Since we haven't figured how to get "the power" going again once it's off this analogy is kind of worthless.
- dmbche 3y ago
  Or maybe that you can only interact with everything in bash, so not the most fine grained control. Or if instead of text all you had were emojis.

fzeindl 3y ago

This is also the reason why self-improvement, changing any behaviors no matter if it's about procrastination, sports or mental health takes so long and is so tiresome. If the brain could be changed easily it would be very unstable and humanity might have died out very fast.

qawwads 3y ago

>If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing. This is what they told us in computer class back then to make sure we don't learn anything wortwhile. Reading it on HN of all place makes me very sad.

zamadatix 3y ago
Why is the only way to learn something worthwhile about a computer to poke blindly at the terminal? Experimentation is a healthy component of learning, but that doesn't make it the only component of learning. Preferably, you at least learn enough about the computer beforehand to know what you risk messing up and roughly how long it might take to get back to the previous state so you can experiment more than once. At that point you "really know what you're doing".
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  GP is right in that "fear of screwing up" is a huge blocker in learning computers. It's really hard to screw anything up so badly that you can't recover by reinstalling the OS / factory-resetting the device, worst-case losing some data and a few hours of your time. But with brains, well, every such screw up would be debilitating or fatal to the person whose brain sits at the other end of your REPL.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    Just a thought - I'm realising that I internalised this fear with computers, having been raised with this idea that they are "easy to screw up, better not to look inside". It was fair when we had a computer room and a family computer, but since you can buy a second hand laptop for less than 50$, and as you said can solve most issues very easily, it is not warranted at all. Edit: I'm fine now, I used to be on Arch btw
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

elesiuta 3y ago

> "or destroy your ability to see blue" This also reminds me of the McCollough effect [1] which can affect your perception of colorless gratings for an unexpectedly substantial amount of time afterwards just by starting at some images. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect

joebiden2 3y ago

> The human brain does not have Terminal (sic) It has, and lots of people are accustomed to it :)