4 ms·

We're just starting to unlock the secrets of the brain, but for all those hoping that this is the one that does it, I will take the risk of saying "It won't hap

We're just starting to unlock the secrets of the brain, but for all those hoping that this is the one that does it, I will take the risk of saying "It won't happen this time". We don't know what the information transfer mechanisms are in the brain, nor do we know how information is stored. We do know that action potentials are the observable and recordable signs of potential brain activity, but that's all we can see. If you have something as complicated [1] as the brain, assuming that one of the first things we found about the brain is the way it lets me think of art, reason about the past, and adapt to my surroundings is plain stupid. Since we discovered neurons [2], there have been monumental changes in how we understand the world. But this still isn't enough. We cannot explain the things that happen in brains with our current understanding of physics. Minds are more connected than one may initially assume. I'll tell you a story about why I know this to be true, and what it means for our attempts to recreate a brain. For as long as I can remember, I have been falling asleep with some sort of music or movie playing. Whenever I would drift off to sleep, I would hear this noise in the background. It let me sleep easily, giving me something to focus on. When I went to Norway this past summer, I didn't have anything to listen to, only my mind. I noticed when I was about to fall asleep, something weird would happen. I would hear things that weren't thoughts I had, they were thoughts in other languages. They sounded like what I was hearing in Norway, but they could have been Chinese for all I know, but what I do know is that they were sounds I never recognized, and they were in languages that weren't my own. Whose thoughts were these, and why were they in my brain when I was falling asleep? Weird things happen when we sleep, but before all contact from the real world shuts off, the transition into sleep may be one of the most important for figuring out what is really happening in our brains. How would this information transfer boundaries between my brain and another person's brain, or another region in space time? This would be easy to pass off as misinterpreted noise, but this happened for many times while in Norway, but when I got back home, it tapered off (I lost my peace of mind when I returned home). Our current understanding of physics is not advanced enough to allow us to understand the brain. We have done cool things with technology, but I think we are farther from understanding what is a person is in the true sense of the question. It's interesting to think about the 'hard problems' that persist over life times. Almost all the problems that we are solving today are not 'hard problems'. They are challenging, fulfilling, rewarding, and helpful in the short term. I once went for a long bike ride, and it had been a while so I was pretty excited. I told my dad about my achievement. I said "Dad, I went for a 50 mile bike ride today!". He said "Yeah, but did you get anywhere?". We are solving problems, but the solutions are not advancing the human race. We are riding around in a circle. I'll stop now, and hopefully start a blog so I can put out my long winded rants there. [1] http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n17/history/neurons2_i.htm http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n17/history/neurons2_i.htm

Permit 14y ago
>Whose thoughts were these, and why were they in my brain when I was falling asleep? Weird things happen when we sleep, but before all contact from the real world shuts off, the transition into sleep may be one of the most important for figuring out what is really happening in our brains. Why do you immediately assume they aren't your own thoughts? Surely you have no problem simulating garbled language or your own garbled interpretation of other languages in your mind right now, why couldn't this have been the case when you were falling asleep? It seems strange to me to think that because of some bizarre or out of character thoughts that the only answer would be someone else's thoughts invading your mind.
- mercuryrising 14y ago
  The thing that made these 'thoughts' different is that they felt real. I experienced hearing something in another language, I wasn't just thinking about it. This happens with music, and every once in a while I'll hear my name. They aren't just thoughts, they are experiences. I don't think someone was invading my mind, I think I was detuning my brain and tuning into something else, a 'sea' of thought. I think they aren't my own because I can't consciously think those thoughts, I cannot simulate what happened just by thinking about it. I think we have more control over the world than we give ourselves credit for. It's easy to cast off stories that are not backed by fact, but what if this was the divide? What if we just needed a little bit of faith to see something that most people can't see? What does a kid see when they play in a box? They see whatever they want to see, they are not tied down by what society deems as real, they create reality for themselves. For a while, I had a spurt of thinking about some new tech idea and seeing it within a week of thinking about it. It was almost like I was forging the path through the sea of unknown information around me. I don't have enough experience in the world to determine whether or not my thinking had influence on what happened, but it provides an interesting framework for some thought. What if you could control the world, and you were the center of the 'relative universe'? Quantum mechanics predicts that prior to the first consciousness observed a wave function collapse, the world could have not existed, it was merely a fuzzy combination of wave functions that never had definition. What if this was happening every time I did something, interacted with something, noticed something. What if, when I thought about something, it collapsed the wave functions necessary to bring me that information? What if I controlled the world, and whenever I reached in to grab information, the necessary wave functions collapsed (regardless of where they had to). What if we could have multiple layers of collapsing wave functions, so you can live your life, I can live my life, and until we communicate, we lose the necessity of having the same time or space clocks? What if the world reconciles the differences when necessary, rather than all the time? It's easy to get sidetracked when I'm thinking. At what point do I call a thought my own? I'm not sure, I'm not even sure if ideas are my own thoughts. My thoughts are the ones where I can follow the train of logic that got me to where I am now. An idea is a lightning bolt. To backtrack where an idea came from, generally all I get is a couple inputs, a big jump in logic, and a conclusion. you can say what inputs were necessary, but that doesn't always get you to the output. I call these 'prime ideas', these are the good ones that cannot be assembled from combining (in some way, shape, or form) previous ideas. Prime ideas are ones that don't feel like they come from me, I wasn't thinking about anything, I was cleaning the kitchen when a lightning bolt in idea space struck my brain. Those don't feel like something I made, they feel like something that was given to me, like someone saying "Here, look at this picture" and I see something cool in my brain.

Permit 14y ago

>Whose thoughts were these, and why were they in my brain when I was falling asleep? Weird things happen when we sleep, but before all contact from the real world shuts off, the transition into sleep may be one of the most important for figuring out what is really happening in our brains. Why do you immediately assume they aren't your own thoughts? Surely you have no problem simulating garbled language or your own garbled interpretation of other languages in your mind right now, why couldn't this have been the case when you were falling asleep? It seems strange to me to think that because of some bizarre or out of character thoughts that the only answer would be someone else's thoughts invading your mind.

mercuryrising 14y ago
The thing that made these 'thoughts' different is that they felt real. I experienced hearing something in another language, I wasn't just thinking about it. This happens with music, and every once in a while I'll hear my name. They aren't just thoughts, they are experiences. I don't think someone was invading my mind, I think I was detuning my brain and tuning into something else, a 'sea' of thought. I think they aren't my own because I can't consciously think those thoughts, I cannot simulate what happened just by thinking about it. I think we have more control over the world than we give ourselves credit for. It's easy to cast off stories that are not backed by fact, but what if this was the divide? What if we just needed a little bit of faith to see something that most people can't see? What does a kid see when they play in a box? They see whatever they want to see, they are not tied down by what society deems as real, they create reality for themselves. For a while, I had a spurt of thinking about some new tech idea and seeing it within a week of thinking about it. It was almost like I was forging the path through the sea of unknown information around me. I don't have enough experience in the world to determine whether or not my thinking had influence on what happened, but it provides an interesting framework for some thought. What if you could control the world, and you were the center of the 'relative universe'? Quantum mechanics predicts that prior to the first consciousness observed a wave function collapse, the world could have not existed, it was merely a fuzzy combination of wave functions that never had definition. What if this was happening every time I did something, interacted with something, noticed something. What if, when I thought about something, it collapsed the wave functions necessary to bring me that information? What if I controlled the world, and whenever I reached in to grab information, the necessary wave functions collapsed (regardless of where they had to). What if we could have multiple layers of collapsing wave functions, so you can live your life, I can live my life, and until we communicate, we lose the necessity of having the same time or space clocks? What if the world reconciles the differences when necessary, rather than all the time? It's easy to get sidetracked when I'm thinking. At what point do I call a thought my own? I'm not sure, I'm not even sure if ideas are my own thoughts. My thoughts are the ones where I can follow the train of logic that got me to where I am now. An idea is a lightning bolt. To backtrack where an idea came from, generally all I get is a couple inputs, a big jump in logic, and a conclusion. you can say what inputs were necessary, but that doesn't always get you to the output. I call these 'prime ideas', these are the good ones that cannot be assembled from combining (in some way, shape, or form) previous ideas. Prime ideas are ones that don't feel like they come from me, I wasn't thinking about anything, I was cleaning the kitchen when a lightning bolt in idea space struck my brain. Those don't feel like something I made, they feel like something that was given to me, like someone saying "Here, look at this picture" and I see something cool in my brain.