Hacker News Reader

Comment by acaciapalm | Hacker News Reader

It continues to astound me how little we actually seem to know about anatomy, especially women's anatomy (hold the jokes, folks).

View on HN

What astounds me is that the human brain doesn't even know it works (at least consciously). Your brain tells your body what to do, but your consciousness has no idea how.

<rant>

For me, that's what's so amazing about neural networks! If you could ask an individual neuron why their f(x) is the way it is, they probably would only be able to tell you that "that gets the result the brain wants". They're like individual computers, yet they can't work alone; only when put together does what they're doing make sense.

</rant>

I wonder why we don't have several conscious thoughts at once.

I sometimes feel I do, but then my sense of introspection goes bonkers.

Perhaps we do! How do you know that your autonomic nervous system isn't consciously regulating your breathing, digestion, and heartrate, blissfully unaware of the less important unconscious processes that acquire food and move about. (I wrote a science fiction story along these lines once, that was described by readers as "uh... interesting, I guess.")

Hell, I'd read it. Still kicking around a copy?

My theory is that we can have several conscious thoughts at once but most of us suppress this most of the time because without a clear "winner thought" that gets the attention and gets to decide what reality is and gets to control the body, you'd end up with what people with schitzophrenia or other psychoses have...

I'd also bet that the first "human-type & human-level" AI will be quire insane by human standards at least if we don't get this inner attention focusing part right from the first time. Considering that this insane AI will also get super-human pretty fast, I'm pretty scared of what it would do before it gets itself to some sort of inner equilibrium or "sanity"...

I like the term from the Halo series for that kind of AI: 'rampant' / 'rampancy'. It's sort of like having a terrible 2-year-old that happens to be inside of a virtual world, on the internet, thinking at super-human speed.

We should probably make that internet uplink mostly mirror-down libraries only.

While most of the time, ideas in my head are extremely cohesive, there are times when they are not. For one, while talking to myself, I refer to myself as a we. In other situations, primarily ones of brainstorming, I can definitely feel multiple "quadrants" of my brain initiating different ideas. The reason I feel they are different consciouses is because each idea is driven by different motivations. Some of these are good ideas, some are bad, some are moral, some are immoral. We mostly come to a consensus in fractions of a second, but sometimes its long and drawn out. Like any good team, we ensure everyone is heard and respected, we understand that there will be disagreements and we won't always get our way. Some of us never get our way. But overall we(I) seem to work well with all of the other versions of myself. Lol, at least for now. There are definitely parts of me which are very upset with the consensus to write this post.

I think you just don't hear a lot about it, and people don't acknowledge it much in themselves, because of the stigma/demonization of multiple personality disorders. For me, as long as I(we) can pass the Turing Test of Normality, I don't really mind that my brain works the way it does. If anything, I quite like the way it works.

That's interesting. I, don't "talk" or "think aloud" in my head myself. At all. Ideas just snap into focus at once immediately. Same goes for when I'm trying to figure out a puzzle or when programing.

At the moment I learn something new it just snaps into place at once and the knowledge is integrated on the spot.

Also English is a foreign language for me and the same goes for my native language. Whole concepts emerge as I'm trying to do or say something and then I have to put them into words(in either language).

Sometimes the process of talking is excruciatingly slow and interferes with my thoughts. I find that I can type a lot faster and that helps a little.

This is true for me, but only for domains I know very well. The less I understand the problem, the more I have to think in my head. But there is a mode that I make use of frequently when I want the best answer I can currently produce - I just have to quiet my mind, and the best available answer immediately bubbles to top of mind.

And why calming conscious thoughts (meditation) is beneficial too.

> I wonder why we don't have several conscious thoughts at once.

This is something that can happen via psychedelics or meditation. I don't know of any way to predictably induce it though.

I hypothesize that this is tied to our small working memory. Introspection suggests to me that working memory does not only hold small items of data, but is also where pointers into bigger networks must be anchored. When I'm thinking about a problem or project, my mind's eye saccades around the small features of the problem, but it still feels like those features are being swapped into working memory.

I have three possible theories for this:

1. Evolution saw no need for it; knowing how our eye's classify light signals into objects and figure out depth etc are not important to survival. What is important is knowing exactly if you are looking at a predator as soon as possible.

2. Too much data for consciousness to handle; There is something like 1 million connections between each eye and the brain alone. Then there is all the parallel processing that must take place to match what we are seeing to the right memory. This process reduces the all the incoming signals to a single variable such as 'car', 'red' etc which can then be passed to our simpler, serial experience of reality.

3. A bit more 'out there': The physical dimension we inhabit is the result of the intersection between two planes, time and space, that seem to stretch to infinity in both directions (no beginning and no end). You could also say this for your own thoughts; do you truly know when a thought begins, or when it ends (no longer part of the brain)? We seem to exist in the middle of these planes, and perhaps that is all that is possible for the conscious experience (meaning, being part of the process of 'seeing' is just not possible).

4. Consciousness wasn't supposed to happen as living organisms do not need it to survive and reproduce. But since humans are so successful: "It's a feature, not a bug!"

What does "supposed to happen" mean in the context of evolution?

I believe what was meant was "not selected for".

However, this could well be argued at length: human consciousness has clearly played a big role in humans becoming the dominant species in the planet.

My personal belief is that evolution moved from the slowly iterating biological cycle to a much more rapid external augmentation cycle.

We moved to evolving tools that augment our other natural capabilities when it became faster and more effective to focus on making better tools than better humans.

To do such would require a subset of the brain to contain more information than the whole, which is clearly impossible.

Indeed, Godel's Theorem proves the futility of this.

Examples of recently discovered human anatomy:

Structural and functional features of central nervous system lymphatic vessels. (2015)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26030524

A newly discovered muscle: The tensor of the vastus intermedius. (2016)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26732825

There's probably more not yet scientifically described.

Forget internal organs, it amazes me that scholarship in the 15th century was completely ignorant the clitoris. From Wikipedia

> Gabriele Falloppio (discoverer of the fallopian tube), who claimed that he was the first to discover the clitoris. In 1561, Falloppio stated, "Modern anatomists have entirely neglected it ... and do not say a word about it ... and if others have spoken of it, know that they have taken it from me or my students"

Yea, especially for common disorders like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and Endometriosis. We don't know why they happen and our treatments are surprisingly meager considering how many women are affected in total.

Then there was that huge study that showed the birth control pill causes loss of sex drive and depression[0].

[0]https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...

That study showed a "link" (i.e. correlation) between hormonal contraception and first diagnosis of depression or use of antidepressants. That's not the same as showing the pill causes depression! Even the study authors explicitly say that more study is needed before we can definitively say there is cause and effect.

It's difficult to truly prove, but many women have noticed this and complained about it. It is only now that they are finally actually looking in to the possibility.

I find it incredibly ironic that people take it as a given that women's hormones might affect moods (PMS, anyone?), but then brush off women's concerns that taking large doses of female hormones might --in fact!-- have an affect on mood.

To be clear, I'm not denying the possibility that hormonal birth control can cause depression or that many women experience problems while on it (I've heard similar complaints to what you're describing). What I'm commenting on is your misrepresentation of what the study is "proving".

I used the word "show" not "prove" for that reason. Point taken though: in the future, I will use "showed a link" or "found correlation".

I am really very careful not to use the word "proved" for the same concerns you have.

Not to keep arguing a dead point, but the word I cared about was "causes" not "show". The study shows pretty definitively ("proves") that a correlation exists. It does not show that hormonal birth control causes depression.

Regardless, I appreciate that you're making an effort to be careful. I've just been seeing this particular study making the rounds on Facebook and I felt like I needed to point out what the study actually says.

Regardless of semantics, I'm glad you see it being shared on Facebook. I really hope it inspires women to stop taking their pills and go all Lysistrata until there is more research done and/or a better solution is invented. I mean, it's the same thing that was invented back in the 1960s. There's been very little progress.

I wish they could invent something semi permanent for men. Then we could cease having the current child support debates. Temporary vasectomy would be awesome for the world.

We can't know much about what we haven't bothered to seriously study for very long.

Somehow reminds me of the anesthesia mystery too. It just works (tm).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com