undefined | Better HN

0 pointscoldtea5d ago0 comments

>The original intelligence that created those tokens was driven by a whole universe of inputs, from hormones to starlight to gravity

Still inputs, that in the end changed something about synapses and their activation. And whether doesn't have a strong enough local effect to be material to the those operations, can be ignored too. E.g. gravity might kill you via a fall or a tide drowning you, but might have zero influence in your thinking at the brain operation level, aside from some influence that can be expressed in weights and such.

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

claytongulick5d ago· 2 in thread

> but might have zero influence in your thinking at the brain operation level

Most of the people that I follow that research this stuff at the doctoral level say that they (and modern science) have very little idea about how consciousness works, the mind, and its relationship to the physical parts of the brain.

We know about a lot of relationships, we can damage parts of the brain and see that damage expressed through changed behavior, but there appears to be far more to it than just a wet neural network of synapses and neurotransmitters that can be accurately modeled with a set of floating point numbers.

Also, as an aside, gravity plays a much larger role in how the brain operates than may be immediately obvious [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9650717/

coldteaOP5d ago

The gravity in the paper, as far as I can see, is about the influence of microgravity (e.g. much much smaller than regular Earth gravity) influence in blood circulation, bodily fluids etc, and as such on sleep, breathing, heart function, and other such aspects.

Not about whether gravity affects the synapses and neurotransmitters in their regular function.

We know of course that e.g. bad sleep or lack of water affects the brain too, as do many other factors. The effects of microgravity studied there are of similar nature.

My argument wasn't that such a lack of gravity, or such other factors, can't affect it in that sense, but that it doesn't play a role on the actual mechanics of synapses and neurotransmitters (in other works, they could be modelled without it).

claytongulick4d ago

Not sure if you read the same paper I did? From the abstract:

"Research over the past decade has demonstrated two co-occurring patterns of spaceflight effects on the brain and behavior: dysfunction and adaptive plasticity. Evidence indicates the spaceflight environment induces adverse effects on the brain, including intracranial fluid shifts, gray matter changes, and white matter declines. Past work also suggests that the spaceflight environment induces adaptive neural effects such as sensory reweighting and neural compensation."

But that's just a single example. The effects of gravity (or lack thereof) on the brain are widely studied, it's pretty easy to find.

Besides, that's all sort of missing the point. I chose gravity as an example of a "huh, I never really thought about that" thing that affects cognition to illustrate the point that there are a gazillion things that impact human cognition, from cat parasites [1] to prescription eyeglasses [2] not to mention all the obvious things like gut health, diet and sleep.

Our brains and bodies have an essentially infinite number of inputs that affect our reasoning - I don't think this is practical, or even possible, to model - and I don't think you can achieve human level reasoning without it.

You can't separate the package from the wrapping when dealing with the human mind. Our biology is our cognition.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1635495/

[2] https://mindeye.com/eye-opener-prescription-glasses-can-affe...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse