Thus humans can never understand the brain because the brain has equal complexity to itself and for the brain to understand the brain then it must have greater complexity than itself which is impossible.
Like many other things in life, we can only hope to understand a simplified and symbolic representation of brain. The problem is... it's quite possible that human intelligence itself has no higher level abstraction that we are capable of holding in our head. The processes that create consciousness, stripped of all the fluff and irrelevant details, may be of sufficient complexity that our brains will not be able understand what's going on.
In short I fear that the ultimate goal of neurology may be a fruitless endeavor.
Your statement of modularizing portions of understanding into pieces to deal with complexity is isomorphic to my statement that we can only hope to understand A representation of the brain as a simplification.
The engineers who understand steering Understand the rest of the car as a symbolic representation. The lead designer of the car understands most detailed components of the car as symbolic representations.
In short each human as individuals CAN ONLY understand the CAR/BRAIN as a symbolic simplification. This is the BEST possible outcome. What you are SAYING is the EXACT same thing I am SAYING.
The one difference is... I am taking it ONE STEP further with a speculation on the nature of intelligence.
There exists concepts in this world that are fundamental and cannot be modularized. It is a very reasonable speculation that the understanding of consciousness itself cannot be further modularized or subdivided. I am saying that in order to understand consciousness it may very well be, that we have to understand consciousness as a complex whole and this complexity may be too big for us to hold in our heads.
This IS a realistic possibility. We are already seeing the limits to this with the black box nature of the neural nets we are generating. Either way this was a speculation. You (and many others) completely misunderstanding and taking it the wrong way.
|Thus humans can never understand the brain because the brain has equal complexity to itself and for the brain to understand the brain then it must have greater complexity than itself which is impossible.
We don't need to know the entire state of the brain at any given moment to understand the mechanics of the brain, just as we don't need to know the entire state of every molecule on planet Earth in order to understand it's physics.
This is what technological iterations, through generations of human beings, give us all. Humans achieve super-human level of technological achievements because we iterate over what others have left for us.
Knowledge is like a stair, made from the hard work of many great human beings, and even for hard problems, with enough ammount of iterations, and with consecutive progress (without social deterioration) we can achieve anything.
Somebody will fill that "last" step in the stair that will make a paradigm shift to all of us..
Not in developmental science, not in neuroscience. Not in how we understand cellular mechanics to work. Neurons and glial cells are born, grow, die and chemically change all the time.
Psychedelic therapy is in the infancy. Go and run trials before building sand castles of theory.
Most importantly, the testable assumption is what, adding energy would change belief? But of what form and sort? Neurons organize into attractors? Then what do they look like and what's the process? Without that it is woo.
You may want to check out some of the background research to get a sense of what this piece is trying to do-- I can recommend: - Atasoy's YouTube talk on CSHW (as linked and transcribed here: https://qualiacomputing.com/2017/06/18/connectome-specific-h... ) - Carhart-Harris and Friston's REBUS model: http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/71/3/316/tab-artic... - More recently, Friston's Waves of Prediction: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
Likewise, a great paper for understanding why a story focused on e.g. glial cells, cell types, and such is unlikely to produce substantial results about e.g. psychedelics: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Beyond that, I would suggest the most helpful criticism is specific. If you don't agree with something, good to point out exactly what you disagree with. :)
This model just does not deal well with lesions. After all, a lesion would be even stronger of a change than normal processes or psychedelics, causing the annealing to revert locally while it is healing. We do not observe this "untraining" behavior caused by healed neural lesions as per experiments on quadriplegic rats that get spinal therapy. They need next to no rehabilitation to run again.
Likewise, existence of phantom pain phenomenon is counterevidence - and why it just cannot be simply untrained.
Yes, I literally poked a hole through this idea. If it actually ever produces working results, then it should be able to fix phantom pain.
Likewise, single seizures would cause permanent changes in personality or skill as aftereffects, which is not observed. Whereas repeated ones do, but still not exactly with permanent effects. How does this model explain the difference? The applied "energy" is the same... However epileptics rarely show similar effects, even if they also suffer Grand Mal seizures. Why the difference?
Why do mood disorders show up most often in adolescence and say not later? How does this model explain age related dementia? Why only certain anesthetics cause mental problems? (Or sometimes cure, e.g. ketamine.) Etc.
The model perhaps works partially in a normally functioning brain, but does not help us understand at all how memory is formed or why is it located mostly in hippocampus. Why cerebellum handles balance and movement, why there is another cortical movement handling? "An attractor forms" begs the question of "why" or "why in this form", which this theory cannot answer. (Especially why these structures are mostly already formed in utero, but still need additional training.)
Whereas developmental neuroscience based on proper hormonal basis can. (Up to a point, it's quite new.)
The whole thing is a logical (as in high level) explanation based on no biological basis. It lacks the complete causation chain for how psychedelics operate and why every one of them produces different results. Most importantly, an underlying chemical based model would produce identical results as the neurons themselves change permanently in response. (See: neuronal memory allocation mechanisms.) We just do not understand all the neurochemistry related to specific chemicals. Likewise how psychedelics and induced seizures are related. They are, but not entirely and any useful model would explain the difference rather than cover it up.
Neuroplasticity is being studied, a simplistic model of "annealing" is not helping in understanding - whereas results relating to say biology of cell given specific inputs are. (E.g. LTP and its relation to CREB and thus other neurochemistry. Synaptogenesis and axonal chemotaxis. More... That get activated during normal and abnormal operation.)
I mean a lot of it seems to be on the right track to me in a broad way, but its problematic because it is a mashup of real scientific ideas but the process seems to be more like a philosophical essay. You can't get scientific or engineering progress from philosophy.
There are good reasons that most of academia moved on from philosophy.
There are philosophy departments in almost every reputable University I know...
Everything that is non-STEM is underfunded, it doesn't matter if it is philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, etc. This has nothing to do with academia itself, but with the managerial society we live in, where MBA-types decide on the value of everything with simplistic, dumb and short-sighted economic metrics.
Science absolutely needs philosophy. Science is philosophy. There is not a lot of encouragement to do real science/philosophy these days, because this requires deep thinking and following all sorts of unknown paths. Everything must be justified in terms of what gadgets can be built with the discoveries.
We are going through a profoundly anti-intellectual stage in western culture.
You will see that science includes a testable hypothesis, experiments and/or analysis, and conclusions derived from the data.
This essay contains none of that.
...
>Science is philosophy.
If you are going to justify philosophy by subsuming science, then you can not consistently claim that it is underfunded. By any reasonable standard, pure scientific research is respectably, if not ideally, funded.
What's missing here, of course, is any consideration for those branches of philosophy that are not science. This strategy of showing the importance of philosophy by invoking the success of science is short-sighted, and does a disservice to fields such as ethics.
Wow, it must suck to work in neuroscience and find out that your entire field is pointless because this guy says so.
I didn't the hate the book but it was pretty weird and not super scientific.
It's a really nice book. Lots of beautiful illustrations and interesting ideas with code snippets for generating those illustrations. I found it fascinating as a kid. The message wasn't too important for me, and I didn't really have the background to draw my own conclusions from it anyway.
Someone on IRC, who was a big fan, introduced it to me.
I actually started programming with this very book, copying the examples from it into Python and then Scheme (introduced to me by that same guy) and Common Lisp. I respect Wolfram's dedication. It's the type of dedication that brings us things like Mathematica and TempleOS.
The guy who introduced me to this book and then Scheme had contacts at Wolfram Research and later sorted me out with a free copy of Mathematica. I could never have afforded that with my pocket money, and I wasn't at university yet. He was a big underdog in the community and had his own problems too. What a great guy.
He's still going strong today: http://xahlee.org/
There's something to be taken even from book like this. It would be good to revisit and re-evaluate the book as someone who now has a semblance of an education in the area. I wish I didn't sell it.
If we invent significant life extension, microdosing may be a required part of the protocol just to keep the brain plastic enough to function. It may already be beneficial as a routine geriatric prescription. "Go play with grandma, she's on her weekly trip."
