5 ms·

I believe that training a system to understand the electrical signals that define a movement is significantly different from a system that understands thought.

I believe that training a system to understand the electrical signals that define a movement is significantly different from a system that understands thought. I work in neurotech, I don't believe that the electrical signals of the brain define thought or memory. When humans understood hydro-dynamics, we applied that understanding to the body and thought we had it all figured out. The heart pumped blood, which brought nutients to the organs, etc etc. When humans discovered electricity, we slapped ourselves on the forehead and exclaimed "of course!! it's electric" and we have now applied that understanding on top of our previous understanding. But we still don't know what consciousness or thought is, and the idea that it is a bunch of electrical impulses is not quite proven. There are electrical firing of neurons, absolutely, but do they directly define thought? I'm happy to say we don't know, and that "mind-reading" devices are yet un-proven. A few start-ups are doing things like showing people images while reading brain activity and then trying to understand what areas of the brain "light-up" on certain images, but I think this path will prove to be fruitless in understanding thought and how the mind works.

fainpul 11mo ago
Does it make sense to think of thoughts, consciousness etc. as an emergent property of the neuronal activity in our brains?
PaulRobinson 11mo ago
We know that the brain is a structure that works through electrochemical reactions. Synapses transmit signals sent by axons to neurons. We can test this. We can measure it. There's nothing else going on that we can describe using known science. Ah, we might say, maybe there is an unknown science - we did not know about so much before, like electricity, like X-Rays, like quantum physics, and then we did, and the World changed. The difference is that we observed something that science could not explain, and then we found the new science that explained it, and a new science was born. It's pretty clear to me - but you may know more - that we can explain all brain activity through known science. It might be hard to think of us as nothing more than a bunch of electrochemical reactions in a real-world reinforcement learning system, but that's what we are: there's no gap that needs new science, is there?
- yeahthereiss 11mo ago
  [dead]
- jaapz 11mo ago
  Can we? We can only see whatever we can measure with the tools we currently have, which are based on the knowledge we currently have. Who's to say there isn't something out there we haven't discovered yet? There's more than enough we still don't understand in many domains of science
  - smallnix 11mo ago
    > Who's to say there isn't something out there we haven't discovered yet Occam's razor? We should work with as few assumptions as possible to get a model with the largest scope. Otherwise we get stuck with a hard to falsify mess.
    - RHSeeger 11mo ago
      Yeah, but "we've been discovering new things for all of history, so there's likely more to discover" seems to a pretty fair assumption.
      - PaulRobinson 11mo ago
        The point I made a few comments up is that often we start to identify the need for a new science based on observations we can't explain with our current understanding. Hydro-dynamics and electricity are examples given in the comment I replied to - but we could see those and go "wait, we can't explain this well, yet". Quantum physics, X-rays, wave-particle duality of light, and so on - we observed something and could not explain it. My point was I don't think that's happening with neuroscience yet. We might not have a complete map yet, but we know where thoughts come from in the organ, we can watch them. Or can we? It's an open question, if people think there is more science to be done to sort out fundamentals, and we're not just in the stage of iterating on our base assumptions more, I'm OK with that, but it's not my understanding today.
Night_Thastus 11mo ago
Agree completely. The brain is so incredibly complex that we've barely scratched the surface. It's not just neurons, which are very complex and vary wildly in genetics between them - it's hundreds of other helper cells all interacting with each other in sometimes bizarre ways. To try to boil down it all to any simple signal is just never going to work. If we want to map consciousness it's going to be as complex as simulating it ourselves, creating something as dense and detailed as a real brain.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- thegrey_one 11mo ago
  I don't think it's anything other than electric activity, but it's clearly not "some electrical signal". It's the totality of them. They are many, and complicated. And they seem to be required for consciousness. Doubt there's any proven conscious state in a human, lacking electrical activity in the brain.
  - tim333 11mo ago
    Re just electrical activity, I think you can add empirical evidence it's chemical as well as beer and other substances can affect your perception of reality.
    - fy20 11mo ago
      There was an AMA about conjoined twins on Reddit a couple of years ago, and one of the interesting parts was that they could each sense how the other twin is feeling in terms of emotions. This is due to a lot of emotional states being based on hormones that flow through their shared blood stream. https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1cgetlq/were_conjoined_twins_with_different_sexualities/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1cgetlq/were_conjoined...
PunchyHamster 11mo ago
seems like trying to take a single pixel signal (so to speak) and interpolate entire image out of it.
quantummagic 11mo ago
> There are electrical firing of neurons, absolutely, but do they directly define thought? Well, surgeons and researchers have shown that electrical stimulation of certain brain regions, can induce "perception" during procedures. They can make a patient have the conscious experience of certain smells, for instance. It's not conclusive proof of anything, but I wouldn't bet against us getting closer to the mark, than we were when we only considered hydro-dynamics as the model.
- saboot 11mo ago
  It goes far beyond smells, in ways I find deeply unsettling We can induce religious experience, see "The God Helmet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet or deep depression & suicidal thoughts https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199905133401905 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199905133401905
  - mvkel 11mo ago
    That god helmet article seems to thoroughly debunk it as snake oil quackery, which is indeed deeply disturbing
  - potwinkle 11mo ago
    The Wikipedia page seems to show that it's just a placebo/scam? The helmet has the equivalent magnetic effect of a fridge magnet or hair dryer, and researchers in Sweden replicating the research in a double-blind study found no effect at all. Looking at the pictures on the official website https://www.god-helmet.com/wp/god-helmet/index.htm https://www.god-helmet.com/wp/god-helmet/index.htm , it's just magnets on a snowmobile helmet this guy bought.
  - david-gpu 11mo ago
    Thhe "God helmet" was likely a placebo device. From the very same Wikipedia article you linked: > Other groups have subsequently found that individual differences such as strong belief in the paranormal and magical ideation predict some alterations in consciousness and reported "exceptional experiences" when Persinger et al's experimental set-up and procedure are reproduced, but with a sham "God helmet" that is completely inert or a helmet that is turned off.
baxtr 11mo ago
This sounds logical and convincing. At the same time, it should also be easy to falsify. Has there been an experimental setup like this tested? If I’m not mistaken it should falsify your claim. Train a decoder on rich neural recordings, then test it on entirely new thoughts chosen under blinded conditions. If it can still recover the precise unseen content from signals alone, the claim that electrical activity is insufficient is overturned.
- plastic-enjoyer 11mo ago
  > Train a decoder on rich neural recordings, then test it on entirely new thoughts chosen under blinded conditions. There have been enough studies about this and the result is mostly the same: it's difficult to nearly impossible to reliable decode neural recordings that differ from the distribution of neural recordings that the decoder was trained on. There are a lot of reasons why this happens, electrical activity being insufficient is not one of them.
observationist 11mo ago
This is silly. It's the sum of electrical and chemical network activity in the brain. There's nothing else it can be. We've got a good enough handle on physics to know that it's not some weird quantum thing, it's not picking up radio signals from some other dimension, and it's not some sort of spirit or mystical phlogiston. Your mind is the state of your brain as it processes information. It's a computer, in the sense that anything that processes information is a computer. It's not much like silicon chips or the synthetic computers we build, as far as specific implementation details go. There's no scientific evidence that anything more is needed to explain everything the mind and brain does. Electrical and chemical signaling activity is sufficient. We can induce emotions, sights, sounds, smells, memories, moods, pleasure, pain, and anything you can experience through targeted stimulation of neurons in the brain. The scale of our experiments has been gross, only able to read and write from large numbers of neurons, but all the evidence is consistent. There's not a single rigorously documented phenomenon, experiment, or any data in existence that suggests anything more than electrical and chemical signaling is needed to explain the full and wonderful and awe-inspiring phenomenon of the human mind. It's the brain. We are self constructing software running on 2lb chunks of fancy electric meat stored in a bone vat with a sophisticated network of sensors and actuators in a wonderful biomechanical mobility platform that empowers us to interact with the world. It explains consciousness, intelligence, qualia, and every other facet and nuance of the phenomena of mind - there's no need to tack on other explanations. It'd be like insisting that gasoline also requires the rage of fire spirits in order to ignite and power combustion engines - once you get to the point of understanding chemical combustion and expansion of gases and transfer of force, you don't need the fire spirits. They don't bring anything to the table. The scientific explanation is sufficient. Neocortical networks, with thalamic and hippocampal system integrations, are sufficient to explain the entirety of human experience, in principle. We don't need fire spirits animating cortical stacks, or phlogiston or ether or spirit. Could spirit exist as a distinct, separate phenomenon? Sure. It's not intrinsic to subjective experience, consciousness, and biological intelligence, though, and we should use tools of rational thinking when approaching these subjects, because a whole lot of pseudo-scientific BS gets passed as legitimate scientific and philosophical discourse without having any firm grounding in reality. We are brains in bone vats - nothing says otherwise. Unless or until there's evidence to the contrary, let that be enough.
layer8 11mo ago
One thing is probably true: You have to train on the individual person, and it’s not transferable to a different person. Similar to how when taking an LLM and training on the fluctuations of its neural network to “read its thoughts”, the training results won’t transfer to interpreting the semantic contents of the network activity of a different LLM. So you probably can’t build a universal mind-reading device.
- JamesBarney 11mo ago
  You can't build a universal mind-reading device that doesn't require calibration.
  - jaybrendansmith 11mo ago
    And when you can build one, you will also get telepathy, telekinesis, clairaudience and clairvoyance. I can't wait until I can send a directed thought to someone else.
    - Scarblac 11mo ago
      > I can't wait until I can send a directed thought to someone else. Oh no, we're going to have ads inserted into our thoughts, aren't we?
dboreham 11mo ago
> I don't believe that the electrical signals of the brain define thought or memory. Yes and no. It'll be something like a JPEG file. You can have a JPEG file that contains an image of a cat. But give that file to someone who has no clue about JPEG encoding and the file looks like random noise. They'll take 100 years to figure out it's an image of a cat. Actually it's like if you take an electron beam prober to one of the NVidia AI GPU chips while it's figuring out whether it likes Wordsworth poetry.
vbezhenar 11mo ago
For me it's like attaching wires to CPU and trying to decipher what youtube video is being playing right now. Absolutely not possible.
- pedalpete 11mo ago
  That is such a great analogy! Another I heard is that measuring EEG is like standing outside a stadium during a match and listening to the roar of the crowd. Reading thoughts through EEG is like standing outside the stadium, listening for the roar of the crowd, and based on what you hear, knowing what the umpire's mother-in-law had for breakfast.
47282847 11mo ago
I thought it was pretty established by now that it is likely that other parts of the body participate in both memory and thought, a fully distributed system?
WhitneyLand 11mo ago
You say you don’t believe something is true and then say you don’t know, but I’ll disagree with “electrical signals don’t “define” (encode) thoughts. To be clear, of course it’s true that our thoughts are more than just electrical activity. The brain is a system. However, it seems clear that thoughts are at least partially encoded in electrical activity. What you mentioned those startups will find fruitless, that’s already been done for years in a research setting. It may not be a successful business model, but it’s already been demonstrated. There are fMRI studies and electrical measurement studies. You could argue fMRI decoding of images is not electrical activity which is true, but a bunch or work shows they are strongly correlated. For electrical activity alone we’re already decoding information like words, so it’s hard to claim electrical activity doesn’t define thoughts. Maybe you mean to say, doesn’t define all the content of our thoughts which is a much different claim.
- biff1 11mo ago
  Well, if you are making the assertion, which you implicitly seem to be, you must first define thought. Is a word == thought? And of correlations, we all know the adage about correlation and causation. Not that I would make the counter argument, that thought is not encoded by electrical signals, but I would bet you aren’t totally correct. Do you think there will be no future paradigm shifts?
  - WhitneyLand 11mo ago
    I think we may not be disagreeing much… Agree fMRI doesn’t tell us for sure what information is in electrical activity. I only mean to imply it’s suggestive. But we still can get a lot of information from electrodes. Do words count as thoughts? I’d say so. Definitely don’t think electrical signals are all there is to thought. They’re definitely part of it, but I think time will show unlike with computer parts, it’s hard to make clean separation of responsibilities in the brain.

fainpul 11mo ago

Does it make sense to think of thoughts, consciousness etc. as an emergent property of the neuronal activity in our brains?

PaulRobinson 11mo ago

We know that the brain is a structure that works through electrochemical reactions. Synapses transmit signals sent by axons to neurons. We can test this. We can measure it. There's nothing else going on that we can describe using known science. Ah, we might say, maybe there is an unknown science - we did not know about so much before, like electricity, like X-Rays, like quantum physics, and then we did, and the World changed. The difference is that we observed something that science could not explain, and then we found the new science that explained it, and a new science was born. It's pretty clear to me - but you may know more - that we can explain all brain activity through known science. It might be hard to think of us as nothing more than a bunch of electrochemical reactions in a real-world reinforcement learning system, but that's what we are: there's no gap that needs new science, is there?

yeahthereiss 11mo ago
[dead]
jaapz 11mo ago
Can we? We can only see whatever we can measure with the tools we currently have, which are based on the knowledge we currently have. Who's to say there isn't something out there we haven't discovered yet? There's more than enough we still don't understand in many domains of science
- smallnix 11mo ago
  > Who's to say there isn't something out there we haven't discovered yet Occam's razor? We should work with as few assumptions as possible to get a model with the largest scope. Otherwise we get stuck with a hard to falsify mess.
  - RHSeeger 11mo ago
    Yeah, but "we've been discovering new things for all of history, so there's likely more to discover" seems to a pretty fair assumption.
    - PaulRobinson 11mo ago
      The point I made a few comments up is that often we start to identify the need for a new science based on observations we can't explain with our current understanding. Hydro-dynamics and electricity are examples given in the comment I replied to - but we could see those and go "wait, we can't explain this well, yet". Quantum physics, X-rays, wave-particle duality of light, and so on - we observed something and could not explain it. My point was I don't think that's happening with neuroscience yet. We might not have a complete map yet, but we know where thoughts come from in the organ, we can watch them. Or can we? It's an open question, if people think there is more science to be done to sort out fundamentals, and we're not just in the stage of iterating on our base assumptions more, I'm OK with that, but it's not my understanding today.

Night_Thastus 11mo ago

Agree completely. The brain is so incredibly complex that we've barely scratched the surface. It's not just neurons, which are very complex and vary wildly in genetics between them - it's hundreds of other helper cells all interacting with each other in sometimes bizarre ways. To try to boil down it all to any simple signal is just never going to work. If we want to map consciousness it's going to be as complex as simulating it ourselves, creating something as dense and detailed as a real brain.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
thegrey_one 11mo ago
I don't think it's anything other than electric activity, but it's clearly not "some electrical signal". It's the totality of them. They are many, and complicated. And they seem to be required for consciousness. Doubt there's any proven conscious state in a human, lacking electrical activity in the brain.
- tim333 11mo ago
  Re just electrical activity, I think you can add empirical evidence it's chemical as well as beer and other substances can affect your perception of reality.
  - fy20 11mo ago
    There was an AMA about conjoined twins on Reddit a couple of years ago, and one of the interesting parts was that they could each sense how the other twin is feeling in terms of emotions. This is due to a lot of emotional states being based on hormones that flow through their shared blood stream. https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1cgetlq/were_conjoined_twins_with_different_sexualities/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1cgetlq/were_conjoined...

PunchyHamster 11mo ago

seems like trying to take a single pixel signal (so to speak) and interpolate entire image out of it.

quantummagic 11mo ago

> There are electrical firing of neurons, absolutely, but do they directly define thought? Well, surgeons and researchers have shown that electrical stimulation of certain brain regions, can induce "perception" during procedures. They can make a patient have the conscious experience of certain smells, for instance. It's not conclusive proof of anything, but I wouldn't bet against us getting closer to the mark, than we were when we only considered hydro-dynamics as the model.

saboot 11mo ago
It goes far beyond smells, in ways I find deeply unsettling We can induce religious experience, see "The God Helmet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet or deep depression & suicidal thoughts https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199905133401905 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199905133401905
- mvkel 11mo ago
  That god helmet article seems to thoroughly debunk it as snake oil quackery, which is indeed deeply disturbing
- potwinkle 11mo ago
  The Wikipedia page seems to show that it's just a placebo/scam? The helmet has the equivalent magnetic effect of a fridge magnet or hair dryer, and researchers in Sweden replicating the research in a double-blind study found no effect at all. Looking at the pictures on the official website https://www.god-helmet.com/wp/god-helmet/index.htm https://www.god-helmet.com/wp/god-helmet/index.htm , it's just magnets on a snowmobile helmet this guy bought.
- david-gpu 11mo ago
  Thhe "God helmet" was likely a placebo device. From the very same Wikipedia article you linked: > Other groups have subsequently found that individual differences such as strong belief in the paranormal and magical ideation predict some alterations in consciousness and reported "exceptional experiences" when Persinger et al's experimental set-up and procedure are reproduced, but with a sham "God helmet" that is completely inert or a helmet that is turned off.

baxtr 11mo ago

This sounds logical and convincing. At the same time, it should also be easy to falsify. Has there been an experimental setup like this tested? If I’m not mistaken it should falsify your claim. Train a decoder on rich neural recordings, then test it on entirely new thoughts chosen under blinded conditions. If it can still recover the precise unseen content from signals alone, the claim that electrical activity is insufficient is overturned.

plastic-enjoyer 11mo ago
> Train a decoder on rich neural recordings, then test it on entirely new thoughts chosen under blinded conditions. There have been enough studies about this and the result is mostly the same: it's difficult to nearly impossible to reliable decode neural recordings that differ from the distribution of neural recordings that the decoder was trained on. There are a lot of reasons why this happens, electrical activity being insufficient is not one of them.

observationist 11mo ago

This is silly. It's the sum of electrical and chemical network activity in the brain. There's nothing else it can be. We've got a good enough handle on physics to know that it's not some weird quantum thing, it's not picking up radio signals from some other dimension, and it's not some sort of spirit or mystical phlogiston. Your mind is the state of your brain as it processes information. It's a computer, in the sense that anything that processes information is a computer. It's not much like silicon chips or the synthetic computers we build, as far as specific implementation details go. There's no scientific evidence that anything more is needed to explain everything the mind and brain does. Electrical and chemical signaling activity is sufficient. We can induce emotions, sights, sounds, smells, memories, moods, pleasure, pain, and anything you can experience through targeted stimulation of neurons in the brain. The scale of our experiments has been gross, only able to read and write from large numbers of neurons, but all the evidence is consistent. There's not a single rigorously documented phenomenon, experiment, or any data in existence that suggests anything more than electrical and chemical signaling is needed to explain the full and wonderful and awe-inspiring phenomenon of the human mind. It's the brain. We are self constructing software running on 2lb chunks of fancy electric meat stored in a bone vat with a sophisticated network of sensors and actuators in a wonderful biomechanical mobility platform that empowers us to interact with the world. It explains consciousness, intelligence, qualia, and every other facet and nuance of the phenomena of mind - there's no need to tack on other explanations. It'd be like insisting that gasoline also requires the rage of fire spirits in order to ignite and power combustion engines - once you get to the point of understanding chemical combustion and expansion of gases and transfer of force, you don't need the fire spirits. They don't bring anything to the table. The scientific explanation is sufficient. Neocortical networks, with thalamic and hippocampal system integrations, are sufficient to explain the entirety of human experience, in principle. We don't need fire spirits animating cortical stacks, or phlogiston or ether or spirit. Could spirit exist as a distinct, separate phenomenon? Sure. It's not intrinsic to subjective experience, consciousness, and biological intelligence, though, and we should use tools of rational thinking when approaching these subjects, because a whole lot of pseudo-scientific BS gets passed as legitimate scientific and philosophical discourse without having any firm grounding in reality. We are brains in bone vats - nothing says otherwise. Unless or until there's evidence to the contrary, let that be enough.

layer8 11mo ago

One thing is probably true: You have to train on the individual person, and it’s not transferable to a different person. Similar to how when taking an LLM and training on the fluctuations of its neural network to “read its thoughts”, the training results won’t transfer to interpreting the semantic contents of the network activity of a different LLM. So you probably can’t build a universal mind-reading device.

JamesBarney 11mo ago
You can't build a universal mind-reading device that doesn't require calibration.
- jaybrendansmith 11mo ago
  And when you can build one, you will also get telepathy, telekinesis, clairaudience and clairvoyance. I can't wait until I can send a directed thought to someone else.
  - Scarblac 11mo ago
    > I can't wait until I can send a directed thought to someone else. Oh no, we're going to have ads inserted into our thoughts, aren't we?

dboreham 11mo ago

> I don't believe that the electrical signals of the brain define thought or memory. Yes and no. It'll be something like a JPEG file. You can have a JPEG file that contains an image of a cat. But give that file to someone who has no clue about JPEG encoding and the file looks like random noise. They'll take 100 years to figure out it's an image of a cat. Actually it's like if you take an electron beam prober to one of the NVidia AI GPU chips while it's figuring out whether it likes Wordsworth poetry.

vbezhenar 11mo ago

For me it's like attaching wires to CPU and trying to decipher what youtube video is being playing right now. Absolutely not possible.

pedalpete 11mo ago
That is such a great analogy! Another I heard is that measuring EEG is like standing outside a stadium during a match and listening to the roar of the crowd. Reading thoughts through EEG is like standing outside the stadium, listening for the roar of the crowd, and based on what you hear, knowing what the umpire's mother-in-law had for breakfast.

47282847 11mo ago

I thought it was pretty established by now that it is likely that other parts of the body participate in both memory and thought, a fully distributed system?

WhitneyLand 11mo ago

You say you don’t believe something is true and then say you don’t know, but I’ll disagree with “electrical signals don’t “define” (encode) thoughts. To be clear, of course it’s true that our thoughts are more than just electrical activity. The brain is a system. However, it seems clear that thoughts are at least partially encoded in electrical activity. What you mentioned those startups will find fruitless, that’s already been done for years in a research setting. It may not be a successful business model, but it’s already been demonstrated. There are fMRI studies and electrical measurement studies. You could argue fMRI decoding of images is not electrical activity which is true, but a bunch or work shows they are strongly correlated. For electrical activity alone we’re already decoding information like words, so it’s hard to claim electrical activity doesn’t define thoughts. Maybe you mean to say, doesn’t define all the content of our thoughts which is a much different claim.

biff1 11mo ago
Well, if you are making the assertion, which you implicitly seem to be, you must first define thought. Is a word == thought? And of correlations, we all know the adage about correlation and causation. Not that I would make the counter argument, that thought is not encoded by electrical signals, but I would bet you aren’t totally correct. Do you think there will be no future paradigm shifts?
- WhitneyLand 11mo ago
  I think we may not be disagreeing much… Agree fMRI doesn’t tell us for sure what information is in electrical activity. I only mean to imply it’s suggestive. But we still can get a lot of information from electrodes. Do words count as thoughts? I’d say so. Definitely don’t think electrical signals are all there is to thought. They’re definitely part of it, but I think time will show unlike with computer parts, it’s hard to make clean separation of responsibilities in the brain.