Mental phenomena don’t map into the brain as expected
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
It seems like remarkable that people don't want to imagine there are the rough equivalent of many, many software layers between the level of the neuron and the level of "reason", "emotions", "self", "consciousness" and etc. I think this comes because the "sense of self" is a process that reflexively takes you as primary and indivisible. A framework that view this as generated by lower process violates this.
Sure they are - in fact it's rendered to linear memory blocks of pixels.
In memory, sure, the image is in a block (although not really, it's composited (not composted) then shipped over a wire).
But the functionality is basically everywhere. Similar in minds. We can see images "trip" localized circuits when they are recognized, but the comprehension and processing of the scene is muuuuuch more complicated.
Similarly, where is the little 8bit block that handles a click on the start button, and why God Almighty is it so _far_ from the start button image!
(This is an amusing idea, but I think "composited" was the word.)
> people don't want to imagine there are the rough equivalent of many, many software layers between the level of the neuron and the level of "reason", "emotions", "self", "consciousness" and etc
It's not that people don't want to imagine, it's that you don't need to imagine that. You don't need to force how the brain functions into the model of a modern computer, though it might simplify and be popular. It's often a helpful analogy/metaphor, and for people that know a lot about computers it often allows them to prognosticate and theorize using elaborate analogies built on top of more analogies, but it's equally helpful to not insist that the thing must be the analogy.
For instance, when I talk to a good friend who is a neuroscientist and active in the development of prosthetics with neural interfaces he is far more skeptical (healthily though) of the computational model than any person I speak to in software engineering or the tech industry more broadly. That's likely because the analogy and model can be built upon with further computer analogies, which people who work with computers love. If we were using an automotive model to describe how the brain functions, I'm sure we would have many automotive mechanics theorizing on the nature of cognition too.
I seems like you're hijacking the discussion to your pet issue. My point isn't about how good in general the computer analogy is, it really isn't. You should consider that maps of brain function began quite a while ago, before the start of the 20th (though accelerated by WWI). Here, the analogy was the machine and the mapping of brain followed functional units in machines. And if you consider the point I make (which pretty much echos the article), it's really a counter-example. The multi-layer organization of software show a system doesn't necessarily have to follow naive physical functional units, especially ones we naively perceive. That's it, there's nothing here forcing the computer analogy.
Neuroscientist love to reify a chunk of brain as responsible for function X. They have done this for 160 years. Only Karl Lashley’s work called “localization” into question but his work was swept aside in the Montcastle-Hubel-Wiesel era of big neuroscience.
Now we do toy experiments using optogenetics of a single inbred strain of mouse and delude ourselves into thinking that we are achieving understanding of a highly complex system.
I’ve worked in this field for 40 years and we are not even asking the right questions.
It is a pity neuroscientists do not know more about analog computing. Can a neuroscientist understand an op amp? Probably not.
To share the harsh light—can a CS expert in AI understand how to get to general AI? Probably not unless, like D. Hassabis, you have a solid background in neuroscience.
IMO, neuroscience simply needs that foundational data and current theory is largely pointless.
There is no (non crackpot) theory of mind yet. Most high quality research on the mind (from a non computer science angle) comes from where it breaks down (schizophrenia, autism), since that's where the money is.
Research into AI and neural nets and stuff may change that, but as far as I'm aware an actual model for how thoughts exist doesn't really exist.
What would an operator which turns a physical state into conscious experience spit out?
C|state> = ????
Can't write down e.g. "The perception of a red apple on a table". Red? Table? Just symbols. Consciousness and word-symbols are just too far apart.
I've come to the same conclusion, after reading and thinking about it for 20 years. I no longer search for answers in books, papers, or threads. It's worse than not being able to find any new insights. I never found any insight that goes beyond describing the problem, or defending the existence of the problem. I no longer expect to see any progress on it in my lifetime.
Let’s suppose we build a teleport device which can make identical copies. As in your standing in pad X then someone else is standing on pad Y that looks identical to pad X and you both respond identically.
Now, whatever that machine reads as your mind state is your actual mind state. We don’t need to make an actual copy to do exactly what you said was impossible.
Perhaps what's needed is data-finding tools along with theory.
There's no reason to think that they compute things the same way silicon "computers" do -- that they're arranged in a von Neumann architecture, or something. But it is true that they perform computation somehow, and therefore are subject to a similar set of constraints, and share similar goals (efficiency, persistence, etc) with modern silicon hardware. (Considering the differences is also insightful; ie our wetware is a much noisier environment than silicon, and likely requires a different approach to error correction.)
This is a useful perspective, for reasons that GP pointed out. We know of many different physical arrangements that are conducive to computing: e.x. Turing machines, von Neumann machines, RNNs are all Turing complete (in principle), and all look very different. So we should question our assumptions about how the brain is organized. Why should we think that, say, sadness "lives" in some physical location in the brain? Does your email "live" somewhere on your computer? (In some sense yes, in some sense, no...).
Is it not equally plausible that the brain implements a very large RNN? And if it does, should we be surprised that if we try to physically locate, say, "sadness", we might be grasping at straws? In the absence of experimental evidence (and even in the presence of it, if flawed assumptions are driving the sorts of experiments we conduct), both seem plausible to me.
Which is just a long winded way to say, I think there is some value in questioning these assumptions. (Not blindly swallowing others, just pushing on why we have the ones we do.)
Only if you reduce the sense of self to ego function, and a western one at that.
Self is a much more complicated process. And good models of it already acknowledge functional and content heterogeneity eg subpersonalities, embodiment, aspirations, narratives, personhood, boundary problems etc. Self exists because it solves these problems and doing so was adaptive.
> It seems like remarkable that people don't want to imagine there are the rough equivalent of many, many software layers between the level of the neuron and the level of "reason", "emotions", "self", "consciousness" and etc
This is a false dichotomy. We already know we have a grab bag of specialized accelerator “hardware”, but also soft/firm-ware layers that glue things together. That’s the whole point of the article, you can’t encode autobiographical memories without hippocampus but that’s not the only thing hippocampus does nor it is the only thing required to encode those memories.
And people have already upped the ante on this; Cartesian reductionism of trapping “computation” upstairs is also wrong. Cognition requires an embodied and embedded agent. It is not even a mere “brain-thing”.
It also throws off by orders of magnitude the effort which would be required to fully model an organism neural behavior.
This highlights some of the unfortunate tensions in this debate, where people may feel obliged to hold to a literal materialism along with a computational theory of mind, and vigorously shoot down anything that threatens to unsettle that somewhat dogmatic position, for fear of strengthening the position of fundamentalist religious believers. In short, it is primarily a political sentiment, not a scientific one.
We should be able to follow where evidence and rational argument leads without being held hostage to such concerns which are strictly irrelevant to the debate.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... (Click "download PDF", it's open access.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobler%27s_first_law_of_geog...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125777.The_Feeling_of...
The reason you should predict localization just from first principles is latency. The bulk of your brain is connective tissue networking the cortex to itself, but even still signals can make many round trips within a small patch of cortex before it can cross the brain. Neurons are large and slow, and the more distant the neighbors they have to interact with the larger they have to be.
Does that mean that the regions of the brain kindly sort themselves into exactly the high-level categories we want them to be in? Absolutely not! Concepts like "attention" or "memory" might not even make sense when looking at how the brain is actually implemented. But regions of the brain probably perform specific tasks.
- The data from the eyes is already lightly processed. The way the neurons hook into the rods and cones is basically running a few convolutions all at once, and the result is what's sent back
- Most sensory info gets centralized in the LGN before it's routed to the various parts of the brain, so it's about the same hop it would have to go through anyway
We actually still have a lot of questions about what exactly is going on in the middle bit. It seems like structures deep in the brain have duplicate versions of all the sense processing and motor controlling centers. What do they do? Well reflexes probably, and maybe somehow motivation? Reward is tucked in there somewhere too, or so we think.
Think of features with distributed representations, patterns of connectivity re-using bits in endless ways. Another oversimplification is that neurons can be only representing 1’s and 0’s. The true computational power is every state in-between and strength of connections between processing units.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9StMQ79LtEvlrskzjoYbQ
I recently stumbled across this and it has some fascinating episodes where he interviews many top people in each field. Michio Kaku, Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, religious leaders, etc etc.
Sometimes the brain and spinal column are considered together in our case, as some of our survival reactions are governed by neurons in our spine, but that does not really match how cephalopods distribute their processing (something that is presumably necessary, or at least helpful/efficient, for controlling the flexibility of their limbs).
nervous system
-> central nervous system
-> brain
-> spinal cord
-> peripheral nervous systemWhen I first read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" it gave me such a profound understanding of the unpredictability of not only brain injury, but mental illness and the fragility of human nature, that I thoroughly believe it should be required reading for late primary schoolers or early high-schoolers to help guide them through their life's journey of interacting with the full spectrum of humanity they may encounter.
A handbook for empathy.
My vote is that the “relay” is actually a timebase corrector for noisy retinal input mosaics that have their own quirky dynamics and temporal noise.
Just as mindboggling as the mind's reluctance to think of itself as a brain.
I couldn't stand my haircut in the mirror.
A bit of an understatement in my experience...very often, minds get rather emotionally agitated when encountering the idea that the reality they perceive is a representation of reality, implemented by a brain (as opposed to being reality itself).
Which is an idea. Which is a point in the mirror, it avoids to face. Same as its mirror can't face the opposite.
Whereever the difference of them my be, if there even is one.
;-)
An idea which seems to be overwhelmingly axiomatic.
> Which is a point in the mirror, it avoids to face.
Are you thinking of this phenomenon where when people look directly into their own eyes in a mirror, or directly into the eyes of another human being, something "weird" seems to happen?
What I meant was that what we call mind has a problem with focusing on itself and consciousness as the object of its studies, questioning itself in the process.
I used the metaphor of the double mirror to make my point about this problem.
A natural-historical anlytic tool used to gather food, hunt prey, find shelter, mating partners and allies.
Not only in a biological environment, but also in a social one. Some argue even the social is the more important.
In short, to survive primarily by modeling its environment in relation to its own goals.
Very late, this tool of the body and its needs presents itself in these models as a problem to be explored.
The tool processes itself.
This is revolutionary because it gives it incredible new possibilities and freedom. And, it is as dangerous as any revolution. Sawing off the branch on which it sits.
That is one mirror, the other is what is called the reality outside of the mind. The problem of what that is that the mind tries to represent in his models.
Personnaly I decided for myself against a dualistic structure of reality and a fundamental difference between mind and matter.
So the origin of that dualism is in the mind. A perspective which leaves two problems.
First, I still do not know what reality outside the model is and second, what daoes it means that with the developement of the mind, the universe became dualistic, because dualism ever since became part of it.
Infinite regress, infinite mirror.
HN is something of an experimental or practice field that I've been using lately to express ideas in a foreign language.
Sometimes thought thrive on happy little accidents in communication.
As I understand it, dualism refers to the manichean notion (sic) that mind and matter are two categorically different things that somehow interact.
Being mind the superior or preferable of the two phenomena.
Aside from the horrible phrasing, it's quite funny to think about, leading us to:
My brain thinks it is funny to think about how the brain doesn’t think the way the brain thinks the brain thinks.
In the same way that atoms don’t exactly work the way the atoms think the atoms work since, as Niels Bohr said, "A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
Reminds me of some comment I heard somewhere, about how the brain and the body don’t come with an instruction manual, and how it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: we so far apparently haven’t needed to know how they work to use them well enough to survive.
Using "memory", "perception" to describe how the brain works is like using 4 elements to describe how our bodies function.
Robots literally have memory and perception (we know because we built them), so clearly these are real phenomena that exist in the real world.
It seems to me unlikely that we are totally mistaken in conceptualizing ourselves in terms of these known real phenomena.
Whereas we seem to describe the brain as having "memory", as if that is something statically stored that is simply "retrieved" (somehow), it seems to me that this overlooks that the device that is doing this is also running an entire virtual model of simulated reality, which can not only remember things, but it can replay them, change variables and play them again, play them in reverse, manufacture completely fictional scenarios, run (as its default) a custom modified variation of "actual" reality that it finds more pleasing (this one has gotten lots of news coverage in the last few years), read the contents of realities running inside other minds (tens of millions if it so chooses), see into the future of "actual" reality, all sorts of different things.
"Brains have memory" is a bit of an understatement of what they actually do.
...but, I don't think anyone thinks that "brains have memory" is a complete statement of what they actually do. It's not a complete statement of what computers do either.
Perhaps. This topic is a bit of a hobby for me, and I haven't really encountered much discussion that explicitly gets into the fine details and distinctions of the matter with respect to the human mind, as opposed to the plentiful discussion on the matter when it comes to computers.
A noteworthy distinction between these two is that computers are man made (such discussions are a necessary component of the development process), whereas the mind is made by ~nature, therefore it requires no such discussion.
If you can point me to any in-depth discussions on this distinction, or even any keywords that one might google, I would appreciate it.
I have a feeling concepts like memory and perception will still be used in the future, even when we figure out the equivalent of general relativity for the brain in the future too, especially since they are more higher level summation phenomena, like personality, or higher level languages vs. asm.
A random, average smartphone can use their device every day, and accomplish a great number of things without knowing how it actually works at all.
For all they care, it could be powered by tiny fairies running in wheels like hamsters, and the Internet and cell networks could be irascible spirits connecting all smartphones together through a worldwide mycelium network.
Knowing how smartphones and computers is not necessary for them to accomplish what they set to.
The same way, if we actually needed to have a deeper understanding of our own inner workings to gain a noticeable survival edge, evolution would probably have taken care of that, the same way it has endowed nearly all of us with at least a basic survival instinct. By eliminating most individuals who don’t feel any need to eat food or drink water from the gene pool.
For reference, the original title is "The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does", this is the one I reacted to.
Its a pet peeve, I guess.
> For if you can't trust your brain, can you trust anything else?
Which basically means, if the brain can't trust the brain, can the brain trust another brain?
Yes slightly tortured, but only to fit :D
We are starting to slide into Cartesian doubt here.
The more we learn about the brain, the more it seems it is very friendly to a certain degree of abstraction. If it wasn't it wouldn't be able to turn sense data into world models so well!
But by modelling them, we can still understand why they behaved they they have, and predict how they will behave.
There is no need for any one individual to fully grasp a process for it to be modelled.
It really is the whole point of modelling.
... that is doing scientific research on itself, and then reading it and understanding the strange symbols on the screen.
[1]: All your organs have unique metabolic signatures, but they, generally, can all run on purely fatty acids; the brain requires about 30-40g of dietary glucose to run optimally, as fatty acids do not cross the BBB quickly enough.
30-40g is almost nothing, could be, say, a cup of frozen berry mix, mixed right into 3/4th a cup of plain real greek yogurt, with some turmeric, ginger, and cinnamon mixed in.
Talk about misleading... obviously these two tasks alone don't account for 116% of the brain's power. The neocortex is all the same part of the brain--yes it can loosely be delineated into segments, but it is pretty pointless to say the whole brain is involved when really the neocortex is just distributing its inputs along its length in the process of searching for the appropriate cortical columns.