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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

Only if you preserve or scan your brain

You’re just a set of weights and biases right?

I don't see a sarcasm tag, so I'll assume you are being straight.

No, things are far more complex than that. Perhaps, knowing the connectivity of all the connections and the "weights" of excitation and inhibition one could model the short term behavior of the brain it came from.

But brains aren't static -- they learn and grow and remodel; they have all kinds of feedback loops (eg metabolic and hormonal); their response to conditions is undoubtedly far more complex than "fire if the sum of the weighted inputs is above a certain threshold".

I’m not sure your rebuttal is sufficient. Weights and biases in the form of a neural network aren’t static either. Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms exhibit learning and growing. Besides who says complexity is necessary or that ANNs are not complex enough?

you would need gene expression and epigenomics too. And still be an approximation, but probably good enough

The "materialism" consciousness theory is primarily what they are arguing against and people in this video gathered lots of solid scientific evidence against it.

If not "brain is a biological computer" then what? We don't know yet, but some things in the right direction are Donald Hoffman's model, Penrose and Hammerhof quantum processing in the brain, Kastrup analytic idealism, maybe it's some form of radio? Authors of this conference through some theories in "beyond physicalism" book.

Those are tangents that someone might want to ponder about but i wouldn't want neuroscientists wasting their time looking for mythical quantum qualia.

The biggest question is why people object to a materialist theory of the mind

And the biggest "hmm" is why/for what reason do we have a specific neuronal circuit/capability to tell us that some god/presence is near us[0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

> And the biggest "hmm" is why/for what reason do we have a specific neuronal circuit/capability to tell us that some god/presence is near us[0]?

I'm not sure you read the article you cited, but it clearly states that the initial claims behind the "god helmet" cannot and could not be independently replicated.

Also, the underlying theory refers to "very weak magnetic fields" that are "as strong as those generated by a land line telephone handset or an ordinary hair dryer". If this had any bearing on reality, the law of large numbers would imply we'd see a relatively large number of people experiencing this effect in the wild in ways that could be replicated and experienced by anyone in the vicinity, which we are not.

So, what leads you to believe that these claims are not made up by either a crackpot or a fraudster?

Do we? The theory you mention is widely disputed, plus even the article you shared mentions issues with reproducibility, blinding etc…

That's why I said "capability". Yes, "god helmet" device may not be really working, but participants were reporting having a feeling (false reading, but a reading nonetheless). I compare it to a broken voltage detector which sometimes show a reading of voltage. That reading suggests there may exist a voltage. Yeah, counterargument could just be a signal of "beware, there is something out there going to kill you" being mistranslated as "there is god out there", but still, "god presence detector" seems to at least exist.

That's a fascinating link, but my materialistic understanding is that the brain is an analogue signal processor, and tries to pattern match incoming signals to known experiences. In this case the input activates the "there is someone with me" signal. Doesn't mean there is.

The brain is not a digital CPU, where every behaviour is a result of specific purpose-made circuitry. There is no "God detector" system in the brain.

our brain is the sole source of our thoughts, and most of our thoughts are baseless conjecture.

What about the neurons in your heart and gut? The brain isn’t the only place your body has processing capacity.

Those are the peripherals. (i.e. keyboard, usb dongle)

A motherboard or SOC's design has a lot to do with the peripherals it's intended to connect with. Interrupts directly influence control logic, for example.

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