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>If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing.

This is what they told us in computer class back then to make sure we don't learn anything wortwhile. Reading it on HN of all place makes me very sad.

Why is the only way to learn something worthwhile about a computer to poke blindly at the terminal? Experimentation is a healthy component of learning, but that doesn't make it the only component of learning. Preferably, you at least learn enough about the computer beforehand to know what you risk messing up and roughly how long it might take to get back to the previous state so you can experiment more than once. At that point you "really know what you're doing".

GP is right in that "fear of screwing up" is a huge blocker in learning computers. It's really hard to screw anything up so badly that you can't recover by reinstalling the OS / factory-resetting the device, worst-case losing some data and a few hours of your time.

But with brains, well, every such screw up would be debilitating or fatal to the person whose brain sits at the other end of your REPL.

Just a thought - I'm realising that I internalised this fear with computers, having been raised with this idea that they are "easy to screw up, better not to look inside". It was fair when we had a computer room and a family computer, but since you can buy a second hand laptop for less than 50$, and as you said can solve most issues very easily, it is not warranted at all.

Edit: I'm fine now, I used to be on Arch btw

The fear was much more real back then. I too grew up with a family computer, but I was the only one being able to both break it and then fix it afterwards... Fortunately, there was nothing that couldn't be fixed by reinstalling the OS, and I quickly picked up on the advice to have separate "System" and "Data" partitions, so you don't lose anything important if you need to wipe the OS.

Reading this makes me realize how incredibly lucky I was to grow up in the eight bit days. When we got our first family computer, a ZX Spectrum, one of the first things I learned is that it was 100% impossible to break the thing just by pressing keys on the keyboard. Just unplug, restart, and the whole tiny system is loaded from ROM. That gave me the freedom to explore fearlessly what the system could do, and what I could do to it.

Edit: I'm sure by now somebody has found a way to thrash the system so hard that it somehow causes irreversible hardware damage just by running software; but I guess that would have to be the result of considerable, purposeful effort from somebody who knew exactly what they were doing.

Fair, but it's still a good analogy, especially for less technically inclined.

If our brains were easy to interface with or scramble remotely, it would become way too easy for one to kill or severely mess up themselves or others, possibly at scale.

With computers, especially today, almost anything can be fixed by a reboot and maybe a rollback. But can you imagine having a REPL to your own brain and accidentally screwing something up? Say, disabling higher functions, or launching an infinitely recursive function, and then losing connection? You can't exactly reboot your brain.

If you haven't read it, the book you haven't realized you're looking for is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Will do, thank you!

I'd say Lexicon by Max Barry is even more applicable

Also, the Animorphs series. Mind you, they're not children's books, rather, they're books about children, in all sorts of horrifying situations.

> "or destroy your ability to see blue"

This also reminds me of the McCollough effect [1] which can affect your perception of colorless gratings for an unexpectedly substantial amount of time afterwards just by starting at some images.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect

This is also the reason why self-improvement, changing any behaviors no matter if it's about procrastination, sports or mental health takes so long and is so tiresome.

If the brain could be changed easily it would be very unstable and humanity might have died out very fast.

It's really amazing to me how instinctive behavior works and what that reveals about how the brain works. Like an instinctive behaivor would need an instinctive pathway from stimulus to processing to motor response. In order for such a thing to work properly there must be hardcoded protocols along that entire path - i.e. not learnt. There may be some limited local learning along the way, for instance the input pipeline may learn to tune out some defects or noise. Another interesting point is that our conscious minds can interact in some limited ways with our instincts, it can be influenced by being put in a certain emotional state, and it can to some extent suppress or override the natural response, e.g. not flinching away from pain. Thus at the boundaries the conscious mind must also speak these common protocols. Then it follows that reinforcement learning in the brain is quite limited in where it happens.

I read somewhere that some believe consciousness to have arisen from paradoxical wants (i.e. not dropping something hot to accomplish a task).

I just remembered hearing on joe rogan maybe 10 years ago about delta wave (?) training, where someone would have their delta waves monitored while watching a movie for example. When the waves got outside optimal range the movie would begin to stutter and buffer until the waves got back into optimal range. It was said to be efficient - and it's effectively training your subconcious.

This might also interest you https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...

It seems like, if was making you aware of a problem and then having you deliberately deal with it, it was training your conscious.

The effects kept going after the training, and you made no conscious effort to change the waves, the discomfort from the stuttering was driving the brain to lower delta waves.

This is all from a JRE podcast years back, so I'm probably wrong, but I think the logic was that this could be applied to other subconcious processes (like regulating your heartbeat to stay in some optimal value, or the serotonin levels in the brain), and that the effects were not conscious. Kind of setting a new normal for yourself.

This looks like a commercial product of the same idea https://sens.ai/store/headset/

Yes, I think it was a guy from there. Probably a scam - would be neat though!

Thanks for the link

you might like Joscha Bach's theory of intelligence and consciousness

We do have “Terminal access” to our minds

It just requires either taking some sort of substance or a lot of practice with something like meditation, yoga or holotropic breathing

So it is pretty walled off as it requires either a special key or brute force, but it is not inaccessible

I feel like we should make a comment here about you're not in the sudor's wheel.

Physical access is root access.

Opening up the "case" requires disconnecting the "computer" from "power". Since we haven't figured how to get "the power" going again once it's off this analogy is kind of worthless.

Or maybe that you can only interact with everything in bash, so not the most fine grained control.

Or if instead of text all you had were emojis.

If a poweruser doesn't put themselves in wheel, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

> The human brain does not have Terminal (sic)

It has, and lots of people are accustomed to it :)