Your Brain is not a Computer

Venusian Broon

Defending the SF genre with terminal intensity
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I thought this was an excellent article that brings together a little of where we're at, with regards to neuroscience of the human brain.


My main thoughts after reading it:

- Always be careful of metaphors and analogies when trying to describe reality. They can be fantastic at getting ideas across and giving us insight, but they are still just metaphors and analogies, not the thing we're really looking at.
- Reductionism, even if it is successful in making a 'theory of everything' and however tempting it us to find a 'simple' answer...is likely to never explain a great deal
- The universe is reassuringly hugely, mindboggingly complex and full of mystery still ;)
 
...Reductionism, even if it is successful in making a 'theory of everything' and however tempting it us to find a 'simple' answer...is likely to never explain a great deal.

The universe is reassuringly hugely, mindboggingly complex and full of mystery still
Takes a real, actual working quantum physicist scientist to say that, lol. Thank you
 
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I can't claim to be a real scientist, I'm just cheering on the team at the moment :)
No matter. It's the real view from the bullring, imo. Opposed to the preening certainty of the celebrity media scientists upon whose every word they hang ...
 
Thanks for the read:

" ... Understanding even the simplest of such networks is currently beyond our grasp. Eve Marder, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University, has spent much of her career trying to understand how a few dozen neurons in the lobster’s stomach produce a rhythmic grinding. Despite vast amounts of effort and ingenuity, we still cannot predict the effect of changing one component in this tiny network that is not even a simple brain ..." of a worm, for example.

In the end it still comes down to this:

"... the working hypothesis is that mind is a product of matter ..."

 
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