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When the steam engine was invented, we thought of the brain as a series of pressures. When we discovered electricity, we thought of the brain as wires. When we got the internet, we thought of the brain as a network. Now sure neural networks have the word "neuron" in them, but they are far far away from the wetware that produced this conversation.

Also clockworks, when they became sophisticated

Tangential, but worth sharing for HN crowd, I think. Psychologist Jung and physicist Pauli worked very closely together to explore the unity of mind and matter. Some of their theories are, frankly, difficult to grasp and so intuitively unfathomable they're easy (for me) to just dismiss. But when you consider that Pauli could conceive the idea of the neutrino, impress Einstein with a critique of general relativity, etc., then maybe he's just onto something. The collection of letters referenced below is really wonderful.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/03/09/atom-and-archetype-...

> Our brains are back propagating, recursive neural networks (...)

Why so you say that? Or knowledge of the brain is still very very dim and rudimentary, and ANNs are simple mathematical models (inspired by brain neural networks, to be sure) to fit parameters to data. It's a bit naive, in my view, to assert such a simplistic answer to a very hard question without conclusive evidence for anything.

There's a saying in neurophysiology that predates neural nets: "Neurons that fire together, wire together". It's not exactly the same as back-propagation, but it's quite close.

In fact, it's the exact opposite of back propagation. Long/Short Term Potentiation is all about the synaptic buton of the firing cell, not the receiving cell (or that mess of the astrocytes).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation

> I hypothesize that the source of most anxiety or nervousness stems from our brains making no correct predictions in that moment.

Since fight/flight behaviour is regulated by the amygdala and basal ganglia, you can say:

Anxiety stems from our amygdalae getting started up, because they sense a threat where none is, and effecting inappropriate behaviour thereafter.

Actually, the threat is often correctly sensed, it's just the behaviour (running away, attacking, feigning death/freezing) that's not useful in the modern world.

The therapeutically interesting question is how to change that.

Compared to the rational parts, those emotional mechanisms are much deeper and better wired to the rest of the brain. At the same time they aren't very sophisticated. Some people refer to them as "reptilian complex".

We can't adjust emotions directly and in general we have to wait much more time (think: weeks, sometimes months) to let new ideas like not being afraid of something sink into the subconscious.

But knowing and accepting that makes it possible to grow.

> it's just the behaviour (running away, attacking, feigning death/freezing) that's not useful in the modern world. The therapeutically interesting question is how to change that.

Finding ways to channel your 'negative' energies into positive, constructive action is basically the foundation to every self-help book ever written.

I'd wager that the first, and often most difficult step is to identify a path that will lead to eventual success (eliminating the threat). Unfortunately, sometimes that's simply not possible.

Like, if you don't have a degree, have a family to support, and the factory you work at is closing down soon, your brain is going to 1) correctly identify a major threat and 2) try to spur you into action. But what if there's no clear path open that will avert the disaster?

I'd wager at least some of this is responsible for the rising rates of chronic illness, drug abuse, and suicide in many parts of the US.

Modern life often constantly exposes us to and reminds us about threats that we can personally do little about.

>Finding ways to channel your 'negative' energies into positive, constructive action is basically the foundation to every self-help book ever written.

That, soppy quotes and a desire for a quick buck.

Do you think if you had been born into a society where male and female roles weren't so binary, and you as a man were allowed to, for example, wear long flowing skirts and other "female" clothes, that you would have felt such a strong need to transition to female?

I sometimes think our culture's binary approach to gender creates a sense of imbalance and alienation for those people who do not fit into the binary. It saddens me that these people see no other choice but to loathe their sex, and make such drastic and medically questionable efforts to transition to the binary other.

I think there must be a way for people to learn to love how their bodies are, even if that sex does not necessarily match the cultural mandate of the "corresponding" gender. It's a hard fight, but it's a fairer fight to fight the culture, rather than one's own body.

I'm just trying to help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disord...

That's actually pretty interesting. I'd say that I hit a lot of those checkmarks, but I've never had problems making friends and developing deeper relantionships. On the other hand, I've had incredible difficulties developing my software engineering career because of my difficulties is trusting my employer and co-workers. I'd say I struggle to build relationships in competitive environments.

I think that's quite a common experience - I tend to find that I develop small pockets of mutual trust (usually <5 people) in highly political and competitive companies. I think aggressively metricised environments are very hard to feel comfortable in because you don't feel like you have a stable footing.

I really hope we can break down the rules tying gendered expressions to sex. I can see the power in the archetypes, but assigning them at birth is really cruelty.

It's a shitty time. I don't know how old you are, but I really hope 30 years from now I meet you somewhere and we can look back and see that the world has moved on. I'm trying to keep a promise to myself that I'll keep trying.

Sometimes I think we're closer to that future than we think.

We're so close. ^_^ We need to make sure the internet and this magical way of archiving and sharing information can't be taken from away from us unless the whole civilization is crippled or destroyed.

Well, I don't share your fear because I think the whole of mandatory centralized civilization should and will be destroyed, and replaced with equivalent voluntary microcivilizations.

I also think anyone trying to control the flow of information is fighting a losing battle, so I don't lose sleep over that one either. Censoring the internet is already difficult and economically costly. Once we have Ethereum on a mesh network of $5 handheld computers, the difficulty goes up probably two orders of magnitude. And we're what, 10 years away from that?

I also think corporations are trying to lure you into thinking they control things, when in fact they don't have any real power any more, we (people with a little credit and a computer) have it all. We are just brainwashed into thinking we need them, so we're not exercising most of our power.

What if Comcast et al stopped offering you service entirely? Would you be lost? Would you be able to find the internet again?

That's actually a scary scenario. I'd be stuck relying on my neighbors for "pirate" wifi which would be unreliable unless I was able to run some QoS and setup their router. If that failed I'd be SoL because I don't know how use HAM radio and access the packet network. What other options or ideas am I missing? Excluding the cell carrier network.

You'd need to rely on your friends, I guess.

There are a couple companies attempting to solve this,

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gotenna/gotenna-mesh-of...

and https://www.beartooth.com/

I feel that Ethereum is not yet another coin, or maybe coins are not simply currencies from the beginning, but ethereum's site did not make that clear except mentioning "scripts". This seems to open a whole new perspective, but I fail to get it myself. Where can I read more on this?

I would start you off with this: Bitcoin is an autonomous software program. It waits for help, and relies on the help of humans, but it can't be pushed around. It either works or it waits.

What Bitcoin does, specifically, is maintain a ledger. That's all. Very useful, but quite limited. It tracks accounts, and which accounts transfer where. No more, no less.

That simplicity made it somewhat tractable to implement, in a world where no one had ever heard of an autonomous software application before. It was the "Hello World" of autonomous software.

Computer scientists were mostly blindsided by this. At least I was. But Bitcoin's success, even in its earliest forms, suggested that there would be a whole wealth of autonomous software coming. We were excited. A whole new way of thinking about software, where you don't write procedures, you write contracts.

It was easy enough to see that you could store arbitrary information in the Bitcoin ledger... a few kilobytes, maybe a GIF. But performance was awful. So an autonomous data hosting service was certainly on the menu, for whoever could figure out a set of contracts that would scale. But it also seemed like an autonomous application hosting service was also possible. And whoever built it would be holding the keys to another Bitcoin-style explosion of value.

Think of it like this: someone had invented autonomous Visa, the race was on to invent the autonomous Heroku.

MaidSafe was one attempt. Ethereum was another.

I don't have any reading materials for you. This is a brand new area of inquiry. Academia doesn't seem to have taken notice yet, and the AltCoin scene is just a bunch of finance people gathering around cargo cults.

I guess what I would suggest: read up on MaidSafe and Ethereum. The Ethereum blog is fascinating. Start at the beginning. Try to understand what's happening and then ask questions. Don't rely on other peoples' characterizations of these systems, try to understand how and why they work.

Or, if you want to trust someone, trust me: Ethereum is currently the best contender we have. Just learn how to make dapps and start looking for good business opportunities within that ecosystem.

What do you think about Tezos? To me, it seems to go a few steps beyond ETH, in addition to be safer and have none of the trust issues - although I only found out about it a few days ago, so I'm really interested what people with more relevant coin/altcoin/ETH background think.

Never heard of it til now. After a quick skim, seems like the basics are in place.

In a world of many competing, stable cryptoprotocols I suspect the biggest pieces of the pie go to communities that are good at fixing problems in incentive balance. It becomes a human challenge more than a technical one. Who are your stakeholders, what are the incentives underlying their supply chain, and is there a better v2 we can design?

If Tezos or any other community shows a culture of doing that I think it's a good investment. Maybe not 2013 Bitcoin good, but a solid growth investment.

Ethereum has the benefit of being first mover, so they will automatically attract some good incentive balancers. And Vitalik has proven he's pretty good at it, having g successfully launched and attracted cash.

"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." Robert Anton Wilson

The quote exaggerates reality a little, but the point is that the world may move on but not necessarily in the direction you think, or it will follow your hopes only to suddenly go outside your comfort zone.

Your first sentence reminds me of the bliss of music. Music is a subtle and sophisticated "plane" say, and predicting where you can walk while keeping some harmonic relationships and sensing it at the same time makes me think that it's a bit like aligning prediction, models and sensation into one.

For others who don't know: taijiquan is more usually called tai chi.

Isn't this called "Cognitive Dissonance" ?

I would say no. Cognitive Dissonance is more about someone saying they believe something but then their actions don't reflect that belief.

An area of Cognitive Dissonance that I have, I know that I need to take more consistent breaks from computer work more often to prevent pain from repetitive stress injuries, But I don't.

Akrasia is a good word for this concept.

aka "Practice what you preach?"

The term itself is concerned more with a person's own experience of the world. What you're describing, i. e. his actions/words as observable by others, is probably closer to 'hypocrisy'.

"Cognitive dissonance' is far less judgemental–its considered to be an essential mechanism of learning.

Your description is not quite right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Your example is not cognitive dissonance. To be that, not taking the breaks would have to go against a deeply held belief, and make you feel uncomfortable.

There're real neuroscience studies that could accompany the theories here. It's a shame none of them have come up in this discussion.

> Our brains are back propagating, recursive neural networks that are consistently making predictions about the next input in the stream of input signals as it changes over time.

Neural networks are a simplistic model of how our brain works, not the other way around.

Thanks for sharing your story. That's awesome. Tell us more about tajiquan? Is it like tai chi? How long have you been doing it and what were the major effects ?

While I can't imagine what you've been through I have spent a lot of time pondering over what it'd be like to be a woman.

>Hits the nail on the head. Our brains are back propagating, recursive neural networks that are consistently making predictions about the next input in the stream of input signals as it changes over time. When the prediction results are correct we save a fuzzy recording of the higher-order-pattern that resulted in our correct prediction. Each time our predictions are correct that "memory" is reinforced so we're able to make faster predictions, at earlier points in the pattern.

I'm not sure that I could ever be so confident in anything as you are to be stating so unequivocally how the brain works given the track record of previous attempts to model brain function and the current state of neuroscience.

When I get feelings for and idea I let my mind thoroughly explore its possibilities. The work of Jeff Hawkins has heavily influenced how I meditate and observe my brain leading to consistently better mental health management. While I say this with such certainty, I know it is a hypothesis that's unproven by studies. But it just feels satisfyingly right from my observations of myself and the world around me. My model of the world is always changing and I'm open to being disproved and accepting new ideas, and ultimately, reality as we understand it.

I'm personally very conscientious in avoiding forming models of the world around me by incorporating what my brain decides "feels satisfyingly right" based on my own anecdotal observations. Humans have been operating as you describe for thousands of years but it was only when some of us began replacing pure cognition, feelings, and intuitive satisfaction with systematic empiricism that we began to make significant headway in understanding the world.

I personally view the feeling of satisfyingly right as the touch point begin empirical analysis. Given the amount of effort required to conduct a study, I wouldn't personally put forth the effort for anything that didn't feel satisfying right, as I'm sure most of our famous scientists of the past guided there own interests and motivations. You shouldn't be afraid of feeling ways about ideas, you should be afraid of becoming attached to a hypothesis, but you could still use an unproven hypothesis to guide your own life.

I agree that the intuitive feelings can be a good starting point for better analysis, but I don't then incorporate those ideas into my model of the world without verifying them to a sufficient degree of rigor. If the subject is something like, "what food is in this unlabeled tin can" then sufficient rigor is opening the can and then I can reasonably assume that the rest of the identical unmarked cans in the box it came from are probably more of the same. If the subject is, "how does the human brain work" I'm going to require a hell of a lot more investigation and evidence before I can say that a theory that I've come up with is correct. Extremely intelligent people have been working on this problem for many decades and while we've learned some things we're not yet anywhere close to understanding how the brain works in even animals with much simpler brains. Because of this, I am very skeptical of any theory I as a laymen could come up with regardless of how much research I read from scientists working in the field, and I certainly wouldn't consider a "feeling of satisfyingly right" as being meaningful at all in my consideration of what model is correct and which is not correct.

I'm also not "afraid of feeling ways about ideas", I just don't built my models of the world based on feelings unless I'm building a model of my feelings.

We are also extremely good at convincing ourselves that things are "true". It is extremely easy for a smart enough person to rationalize almost any personal or "deeply held" belief.

On the other hand some things are within our purview to decide and act upon if we believe in them and they feel "right", no rationalizing or justification required. I am always suspicious if I find myself rationalizing a belief or feeling. But if I simply enjoy it or it seems "right".. I just stop thinking there. Mostly these are things that only impact oneself, and not others. I think when choices impact others more analysis is then required depending on the nature of the decision.

Models can be very risky to apply to why we think a certain way, because they are almost always wrong. Or they can be more right than wrong, but wrong in very impactful ways.