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I have a very rudimentary understanding of how electricity and electronic circuitry and transistor work, but it does make me wonder: We use programming languag
by AlienRobot 3y ago
I have a very rudimentary understanding of how electricity and electronic circuitry and transistor work, but it does make me wonder:
We use programming languages like C to create complex branching algorithms that are turned a linear machine code tape. Programmers generally can not understand assembly even if they understand the branching code that is turned into assembly. Even if assembly had variables, just the fact that if/else's and function calls are turned into jumps is enough to make the code too complicated to understand. It might be possible to disassemble back to C by resolving the jumps into something that is easier to understand.
Imagine if brains worked the same way. That there is actually a naturally-forming high level "brain language" that is turned by a "brain compiler" function into a low-level "brain assembly," but when we look at it all we see is the assembly. That what the brain is actually doing is relatively simple, but because we can only observe the output of the compiler function it appears to be insanely complex to reverse-engineer.
Then again, I don't have the faintest idea of how brains work either.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> Imagine if brains worked the same way. That there is actually a naturally-forming high level "brain language" that is turned by a "brain compiler" function into a low-level "brain assembly," but when we look at it all we see is the assembly. And then make it analog and full of self-referential hacks. Though honesty, if nature wanted to screw with us, it would make brain properly encrypted, perhaps even running on homomorphic encryption. Good luck deciphering that.
- AlienRobot 3y agoIf our brains evolved to be protected against man-in-the-middle attacks, that would be extremely scary because it would imply the proto-humans that didn't have this ability went extinct to some brain-invading predator!
- omgwtfbyobbq 3y agoIf we go far enough back, we may have done common ancestor/s that did develop compensatory mechanism/s to at least somewhat mitigate specific kinds of attacks, like what tarantula hawks can do to tarantulas.
- bagful 3y agoImagine this to be the very reason the human mind is mostly self-illegible — that the birth of the inscrutable unconscious was a defense mechanism?
- achileas 3y agoUnconscious behaviors are often conserved across species and (lower level brain behaviors) in functionally and evolutionarily similar parts of the brain.