[charles brough]

westwind, on 2 February 2012 - 04:34 AM, said:

Dear fellow members, Thank you for the present debate on understanding the human brain. Could I test your patience with a couple of light hearted observations; you see I have just had a brainwave. I dreamed a dream and out of that dream, which took me all over this world at no cost and into realmes of the mundane ( my everyday existance ), I had an awakening Question. What real business is my brain up to? Are dreams play time for the brain? Complex dreams are busily being composed and stressed over by an agitated chemical process, or maybe neuron activity is involved. Why? Is dreaming part of the work of the brain? If so, where, or what, or who are dreams directed at? What useful purpose do they serve? I am not asking fellow members for posts here. Nor am I asking members for answers to my questions. I am making observations that certainly point to the difficulty in understanding the human brain. westwind.

Surely you don't expect the forum members to give answers to all those questions!! That is what education is for. You go to college, or you do research on your own. All that you are unfamiliar with has been reseached and you could learn a lot from it.

[DrmDoc]

westwind, on 2 February 2012 - 04:34 AM, said:

Dear fellow members, Thank you for the present debate on understanding the human brain. Could I test your patience with a couple of light hearted observations; you see I have just had a brainwave. I dreamed a dream and out of that dream, which took me all over this world at no cost and into realmes of the mundane ( my everyday existance ), I had an awakening Question. What real business is my brain up to? Are dreams play time for the brain? Complex dreams are busily being composed and stressed over by an agitated chemical process, or maybe neuron activity is involved. Why? Is dreaming part of the work of the brain? If so, where, or what, or who are dreams directed at? What useful purpose do they serve? I am not asking fellow members for posts here. Nor am I asking members for answers to my questions. I am making observations that certainly point to the difficulty in understanding the human brain. westwind.

Rhetorical musings notwithstanding, those questions are not so difficult to answer for those who are versed in the science of the dreaming brain or for those who are sincerely interested in studying the substantial volumes of credible, scientifically obtained, peer-reviewed research enveloping dreaming and the dreaming brain. Did you know that dreaming appears to be an altered state of consciousness as suggested by the almost conscious levels of neural activity the brain experiences amid the sleep process. Perhaps the best place to begin your search for the answers you may seek is with brain evolution and how the various components of the sleep process likely evolved.

[calabi]

How does neurons firing result in our experience? We've found the neurons that we experience when we see red. But how does firing of the neurons equate to what we experience? How does the result equate to the small mechanical process? Red doesnt appear as some activation of neurons. How can firing neurons create the differences between red and blue.

Our experience doesnt equate to the mechanical processes. You might be able to find where they are and what bit does what. But we dont experience anything the way these processes tell us we should. As some kind of zombie, that just responds. If you just look at someone elses brain they would not appear to be conscious.

Your not going to get the answer to this by looking at other peoples brains, or zooming in and examing things in minute detail. Some kind of new thinking or holistic approach will need to be taken, or maybe there is no approach and it is impossible.

[Santalum]

DrmDoc, on 31 January 2012 - 06:45 PM, said:

I think I understand; you are referring to a functional bias--a bias originating from the way all brains appear to process information. However, can we be sure that all brains have some functional commonality. For example, I see the color red because that was how someone identified that color to me as a child and as concurred by my peers. However, red may be green and green may be red from my perspective; therefore, what I've learned to perceive as red may not truly be the color that others percieve. From another perspective, autism is a prime example that not all brain receive and process information in the same manner. Nevertheless, these non-conforming functional brains give us a functional perspective that enhances what we generally know and are capable of knowing about brain function.

At least in humans colour perception is largely universal even if it is not uniform.

Except for those with colour blindness, everyone agrees on what red is etc. Otherwise, for example, traffic lights would not work and there would be chaos on the roads.

calabi, on 2 February 2012 - 08:35 PM, said:

How does neurons firing result in our experience? We've found the neurons that we experience when we see red. But how does firing of the neurons equate to what we experience? How does the result equate to the small mechanical process? Red doesnt appear as some activation of neurons. How can firing neurons create the differences between red and blue.

Our experience doesnt equate to the mechanical processes. You might be able to find where they are and what bit does what. But we dont experience anything the way these processes tell us we should. As some kind of zombie, that just responds. If you just look at someone elses brain they would not appear to be conscious.

Your not going to get the answer to this by looking at other peoples brains, or zooming in and examing things in minute detail. Some kind of new thinking or holistic approach will need to be taken, or maybe there is no approach and it is impossible.

How do a group of transistors in a CPU, all firing in particular ways, result in a 'p' your computer screen in some cases and an 'a' in others?

Just because you cannot comprehend how firing neurones in our bain result in what we feel and experience does not mean that they are not responsible for it.

IF our feelings and experiences are independant of our neurones then why are their comatose patients, brain dead patients and brain damaged patients etc?

[Ben Bowen]

Quote

Can a system (such as the brain) be "pointed" at itself?

Definitely, but not always "directly".



Highlighting 5:21 - 6:22

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
- Carl Sagan

Quote

How does neurons firing result in our experience? ... Your not going to get the answer to this by looking at other peoples brains, or zooming in and examing things in minute detail. Some kind of new thinking or holistic approach will need to be taken, or maybe there is no approach and it is impossible.

A theory is: although you claim to "see a full image" gathered by your eyes, which is seemingly integrated into your "mono-centre of consciousness", this is only because your brain is wired to reflect upon itself like that.

Unlike a computer screen where the image displayed is simply a matrix of pixels, the layers and complexity of neurons (particularly visual, but not exclusively) must be so dense and comprehensive -- from precisely concrete to highly abstract, and absolutely everything in between -- that this phenomena of consciousness does bizarrely, yet plainly exist.

This is a strong particular case when a system (such as the brain) cannot be pointed directly at itself. Likely one of the strongest cases, at that. Contrary to what you (calabi) have denied, the only way we can understand "consciousness" is by doing the dirty work. Ethos. Scientific research.

But in other words, yes a mere machine can "experience with consciousness" just as we believe ourselves to, at least by this concept. From giving this statement, I predict people will insist bringing examples of quantum behavior and other [stretched] ideas to discuss. Helplessly, I can only say we should consider epistemology and for now, stay close to neuroscience. We haven't prepared or discovered enough information to sensibly theorize around the subject of "conscious phenomena". To be decent, I should say I've only given a concept as far as I'm aware.

Quote

How do a group of transistors in a CPU, all firing in particular ways, result in a 'p' your computer screen in some cases and an 'a' in others?

From a high level, character glyphs are found by a memory offset pointing to one bitmap of a bitmap array (a "font"), which a letter or symbol may be encoded by. A well known character standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii


Off-topic note:
I wish an AJAX implementation allowed me to look at different pages while creating a post. That would be useful.

This post has been edited by Ben Bowen: 3 February 2012 - 04:45 AM

[Tres Juicy]

Santalum, on 2 February 2012 - 10:14 PM, said:

At least in humans colour perception is largely universal even if it is not uniform.

Can you prove this?

I may well percieve the sky to be red, but since I have been taught from an early age that the name of that colour is blue I will call it blue

If you show me what you percieve to be blue, I will also call it blue

It doesn't mean we see the same thing

[Santalum]

Ben Bowen, on 3 February 2012 - 03:22 AM, said:

Definitely, but not always "directly".



Highlighting 5:21 - 6:22

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
- Carl Sagan


A theory is: although you claim to "see a full image" gathered by your eyes, which is seemingly integrated into your "mono-centre of consciousness", this is only because your brain is wired to reflect upon itself like that.

Unlike a computer screen where the image displayed is simply a matrix of pixels, the layers and complexity of neurons (particularly visual, but not exclusively) must be so dense and comprehensive -- from precisely concrete to highly abstract, and absolutely everything in between -- that this phenomena of consciousness does bizarrely, yet plainly exist.

This is a strong particular case when a system (such as the brain) cannot be pointed directly at itself. Likely one of the strongest cases, at that. Contrary to what you (calabi) have denied, the only way we can understand "consciousness" is by doing the dirty work. Ethos. Scientific research.

But in other words, yes a mere machine can "experience with consciousness" just as we believe ourselves to, at least by this concept. From giving this statement, I predict people will insist bringing examples of quantum behavior and other [stretched] ideas to discuss. Helplessly, I can only say we should consider epistemology and for now, stay close to neuroscience. We haven't prepared or discovered enough information to sensibly theorize around the subject of "conscious phenomena". To be decent, I should say I've only given a concept as far as I'm aware.


From a high level, character glyphs are found by a memory offset pointing to one bitmap of a bitmap array (a "font"), which a letter or symbol may be encoded by. A well known character standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii


Off-topic note:
I wish an AJAX implementation allowed me to look at different pages while creating a post. That would be useful.

I know full well how how glyphs are displayed on the screen. I was merely using it as an example of how the average non-IT literate perosn might conclude that the process is som complex it is not understandable.

Tres Juicy, on 3 February 2012 - 09:26 AM, said:

Can you prove this?

I may well percieve the sky to be red, but since I have been taught from an early age that the name of that colour is blue I will call it blue

If you show me what you percieve to be blue, I will also call it blue

It doesn't mean we see the same thing

As a matter of fact Tres Juicy the idea that human colour perception is universal IS pretty much a proven fact!

Colour perception begins in the retina with the cones of which there a 3 types attuned to red, blue and green wave length bands. Since all humans have exactly the same 3 kinds of cones, except perhaps those with colour blindness then it is entirely reasonable to assume that all humans perceive the same wave length band as the same colour.

Although, as previously stated, there are variations in the details. Some people may be more or less sensitive to given wavelengths and may disagree for example on the hue or brightness of a given colour. E.G. The Himba people in Africa who are particularly sensitive to shades of green.

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Color_vision

[calabi]

We dont see colours the same. Language can even effect our perception of them.

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=4b71rT9fU-I

Quote

How do a group of transistors in a CPU, all firing in particular ways, result in a 'p' your computer screen in some cases and an 'a' in others?<br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); "><br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); ">Just because you cannot comprehend how firing neurones in our bain result in what we feel and experience does not mean that they are not responsible for it.<br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); "><br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); ">IF our feelings and experiences are independant of our neurones then why are their comatose patients, brain dead patients and brain damaged patients etc?

I'm not saying that they are not responsible for it, but I'm saying that merely looking at them may not tell us much.

We are not computers, we use computers which translate things into the way we see. But how does our brains translate things into the way we see.

I'm not sure what you are trying to get at with comatose patients and brain dead people. I'm not sure if I'm able to explain well enough, but maybe your example of the computer will help. There is no reason for us to be conscious, their probably is because we are, but we havent found that reason yet.

A computer doesnt see what it does, it creates these pixels on the monitor, all it sees(it doesnt see anything really) is the pixels which are just excitations of liquid crystals. You might be able to make programs that see patterns in the pixels, like faces but they arent really seeing the faces. Just an arrangement of elements that match to a pattern. We might be doing the same thing but we are not aware of it. Whether we are able to make computers that are conscious I dont know, until we understand our own I doubt it.

The simplified way we experience the world its weird.

There are people that are working on mapping the brain and all its connections. Consciousness perhaps results from complex cyclic behaviours. I'm of the opinion it might be fathomed. Like the world, the way you see it has to be inside your head. So you think your looking out of your eyes but your not, your looking at a simulation inside your head of what your mind has translated from your eyes. The pattern of the neurons that makes that doesnt neccesarily have to be the same though. Thats the way I think it could be done, how exactly your mind does it is the question.

[Ben Bowen]

I'm not sure if anyone grasped the deep concept I was trying to throw out in my earlier post. I wasn't merely suggesting that "computers are conscious" (which is nonsense), I only said that they can be "conscious". Awe... this will be frustrating to explain.

@Santalum
Sorry.

@calabi
Wow, just as I hypothesized! I've been classified "colorblind" my whole life, however from close observation I've doubted the common notion of what it meant. At least in my case, its simply a difference of the brain and how it developed, not of the eyes or of some birth defect. Now to think of it, the idea of a birth defect which somehow makes your eyes "unable to measure select colors properly" sounds very stupid. Great video. I'm glad to see this research has been done. I was actually going to try explaining the very same idea in the last post (to support some things I wanted to say), but I thought the concept would be too alien for anyone to fairly consider. This is a great relief. Thank you very much for sharing that video!

Quote

A computer doesnt see what it does, it creates these pixels on the monitor ... You might be able to make programs that see patterns in the pixels, like faces but they arent really seeing the faces. Just an arrangement of elements that match to a pattern. We might be doing the same thing but we are not aware of it. Whether we are able to make computers that are conscious I dont know, until we understand our own I doubt it.

Yes, this must be everyone's initial assumption. Its considerably difficult to suggest otherwise, as I will explain why later (not in this post, sorry).

I had a dream last night. As I woke up this morning, I wondered particularly about how my brain represented the images and events which I "experienced" in the dream. Sometimes I dream very lucidly, where the dream seems indistinguishable from awake reality.

Have you ever had a dream which seems to last for hours of the night, yet you may only be asleep a short duration? You may even experience multiple epics within the same night. Then you wake up in awe with the feeling as if you just read twenty whole novels in a single night! I think this is easy to find an explanation for. Its simply because you "make up" and experience the dream much faster than you can experience awake reality. Due to hierarchical abstraction of information and memory, native experiences (generated by your own mind) can be iterated on the fly. While dreaming, your mind goes through a daft relay of connections. If your dream is full of nonsense, these faulty connections are found (by comparison with "axioms" baked into your memory) and corrected during the natural process.

During awake life, you're processing external information. Miniscule observations which may already have been well abstracted and classified into your memory will only bloat your experience, inconveniently prolonged by the persistence of uncontrollable time. When you read a fictional book, its not only necessary to read and understand the words, sentences, dialogue and apply surface-level comprehension. Most importantly, you are required to run this information through a much higher pipeline of abstraction and relation, in the act of "painting a picture" around the story. In contrast, this can all happen simultaneously during a dream. Because dreams are native and your brain is not trying to integrate external information as it usually does, connections are very lively.

Evidently, the information and process of a brain are merely the substance and mechanical throughput of a massive dynamic hierarchy.

This post has been edited by Ben Bowen: 3 February 2012 - 09:27 PM

[Santalum]

calabi, on 3 February 2012 - 02:21 PM, said:

We dont see colours the same. Language can even effect our perception of them.

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=4b71rT9fU-I



I'm not saying that they are not responsible for it, but I'm saying that merely looking at them may not tell us much.

We are not computers, we use computers which translate things into the way we see. But how does our brains translate things into the way we see.

I'm not sure what you are trying to get at with comatose patients and brain dead people. I'm not sure if I'm able to explain well enough, but maybe your example of the computer will help. There is no reason for us to be conscious, their probably is because we are, but we havent found that reason yet.

A computer doesnt see what it does, it creates these pixels on the monitor, all it sees(it doesnt see anything really) is the pixels which are just excitations of liquid crystals. You might be able to make programs that see patterns in the pixels, like faces but they arent really seeing the faces. Just an arrangement of elements that match to a pattern. We might be doing the same thing but we are not aware of it. Whether we are able to make computers that are conscious I dont know, until we understand our own I doubt it.

The simplified way we experience the world its weird.

There are people that are working on mapping the brain and all its connections. Consciousness perhaps results from complex cyclic behaviours. I'm of the opinion it might be fathomed. Like the world, the way you see it has to be inside your head. So you think your looking out of your eyes but your not, your looking at a simulation inside your head of what your mind has translated from your eyes. The pattern of the neurons that makes that doesnt neccesarily have to be the same though. Thats the way I think it could be done, how exactly your mind does it is the question.

Well OK.

Similarly looking at individual transistors in a CPU will tell you very little about how it all works.

The problem with unravelling brain function is that there is no systematic tool, as far as I am ware, for mapping neural connections given that one neurone has many hundreds of thousands of connections to other neurons. Where as transistors have only one input and one output.

A tool will have to be developed that some how averages the connections of one neurone to the next so that the complexity is reduced to something resembling the the very simple connections between transistors.

Until such a tool is developed it will be extraordinarily difficult to unravel and comprehend all the neural pathways.

calabi, on 3 February 2012 - 02:21 PM, said:

We dont see colours the same. Language can even effect our perception of them.

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=4b71rT9fU-I



I'm not saying that they are not responsible for it, but I'm saying that merely looking at them may not tell us much.

We are not computers, we use computers which translate things into the way we see. But how does our brains translate things into the way we see.

I'm not sure what you are trying to get at with comatose patients and brain dead people. I'm not sure if I'm able to explain well enough, but maybe your example of the computer will help. There is no reason for us to be conscious, their probably is because we are, but we havent found that reason yet.

A computer doesnt see what it does, it creates these pixels on the monitor, all it sees(it doesnt see anything really) is the pixels which are just excitations of liquid crystals. You might be able to make programs that see patterns in the pixels, like faces but they arent really seeing the faces. Just an arrangement of elements that match to a pattern. We might be doing the same thing but we are not aware of it. Whether we are able to make computers that are conscious I dont know, until we understand our own I doubt it.

The simplified way we experience the world its weird.

There are people that are working on mapping the brain and all its connections. Consciousness perhaps results from complex cyclic behaviours. I'm of the opinion it might be fathomed. Like the world, the way you see it has to be inside your head. So you think your looking out of your eyes but your not, your looking at a simulation inside your head of what your mind has translated from your eyes. The pattern of the neurons that makes that doesnt neccesarily have to be the same though. Thats the way I think it could be done, how exactly your mind does it is the question.

With various robots and drones that these days have very powerful CPU etc and can process detailed images to distance measurements and obstacle avoidance ect, but that lack consciousness, they are never any where near as good as a human being.

The best military drones combine powerful computers and cameras etc with the consciousness of a human operator.

Perhaps an close approximation to a human with full processing power but no consciousness is a sleep walker who liable to walk in front of a bus or off the edge off a cliff. Without a conscious human operator, an otherwise autonomous drone is very likely to do the same thing.

It is fairly obvious to me from the various documentaries I have watched over the years that the powerful processing power of the human brain is useless without consciousness to bring it all together in a coherrent manor. And indeed that it is not possible to have this sort of computing power without generating consciousness by default.

Consciousness is as much an inevitable result of the functioning of a complex and powerful brain just as speed and sound are the inevitable results of a motorcycle functioning.

Perhaps consciousness is indeed unavoidable once you go beyond a certain threshold of computer (organic or inorganic) processing power. Perhaps this is a fundamental truth of the cosmos.

This post has been edited by Santalum: 4 February 2012 - 01:40 PM

[Ben Bowen]

I am dumbfounded! Its not about processing power at all.


Today's average computers are insanely faster than the human brain. Not only by computation, but also by logic and anything else consistent you throw at them. Its about hierarchy, representation, and structure! Pummeling millions of atomic pieces of information through a tree of classification and reduction, towards an ultimate abstraction. The bigger the brain, the more capable it is of developing and handling higher abstractions. Therefore, the bigger the brain, the more "intelligent" it is.

Human brains sort of combine information with the means of processing (don't think of it exactly like that, but..) they have an architecture ideally capable of conscience.

A simple algorithm might compare images by summing the red, green and blue bytes into integers (for both individual images). Then it would divide each color-component sum by the total number of pixels that were sampled, take the absolute difference of these color-component values between the two images, add them together, and divide by three. The final result should be a difference value between 0 and 255, 0 meaning they had a perfectly equal quantization of colors.

widthA = 20
heightA = 50

redA = 102000
greenA = 30600
blueA = 73950

widthB = 90
heightB = 40

redB = 357000
greenB = 153000
blueB = 229500

areaA = widthA * heightA = 20 * 50 = 1000
areaB = widthB * heightB = 90 * 40 = 3600

redA = redA / areaA = 102000 / 1000 = 102
greenA = greenA / areaA = 30600 / 1000 = 31
blueA = blueA / areaA = 73950 / 1000 = 74

redB = redB / areaB = 357000 / 3600 = 100
greenB = greenB / areaB = 153000 / 3600 = 42
blueB = blueB / areaB = 229500 / 3600 = 64

redDiff = |redA - redB| = |102 - 100| = 2
greenDiff = |greenA - greenB| = |31 - 42| = 11
blueDiff = |blueA - blueB| = |74 - 64| = 10

diffSum = redDiff + greenDiff + blueDiff = 23
diffFinal = diffSum / 3 = 23 / 3 = 7

However, this comparison is almost useless. Who would want to run a program like this on the worlds most powerful super computer? Intelligence must be capable of abstraction, and only a very particular intelligent architecture can be fully conscious as we think of ourselves. When you look at an image, "you" are far from the level of reasoning about a mere collection of colors.

I believe its possible to create machines such as self driving cars, or robots capable of reading a book and really understanding the contents, or whatever yet only humans have done to date. But depending on the architecture of the machine, it may or may not be conscious. I predict machines designed for practical efficiency purposes would not be conscious. They really could run on hardware similar to what we have now, but only to serve as extremely versatile number crunching machines. In fact, by the differences of common computer architecture and organic brains, they could be incredibly (INSANELY!) more powerful, yet just as capable of human-like things. They would only lack a conscience, and that's for the better of efficiency.

This post has been edited by Ben Bowen: 4 February 2012 - 07:19 PM

[calabi]

Ben Bowen, on 3 February 2012 - 09:25 PM, said:

I'm not sure if anyone grasped the deep concept I was trying to throw out in my earlier post. I wasn't merely suggesting that "computers are conscious" (which is nonsense), I only said that they can be "conscious". Awe... this will be frustrating to explain.

@Santalum
Sorry.

@calabi
Wow, just as I hypothesized! I've been classified "colorblind" my whole life, however from close observation I've doubted the common notion of what it meant. At least in my case, its simply a difference of the brain and how it developed, not of the eyes or of some birth defect. Now to think of it, the idea of a birth defect which somehow makes your eyes "unable to measure select colors properly" sounds very stupid. Great video. I'm glad to see this research has been done. I was actually going to try explaining the very same idea in the last post (to support some things I wanted to say), but I thought the concept would be too alien for anyone to fairly consider. This is a great relief. Thank you very much for sharing that video!


Yes, this must be everyone's initial assumption. Its considerably difficult to suggest otherwise, as I will explain why later (not in this post, sorry).

I had a dream last night. As I woke up this morning, I wondered particularly about how my brain represented the images and events which I "experienced" in the dream. Sometimes I dream very lucidly, where the dream seems indistinguishable from awake reality.

Have you ever had a dream which seems to last for hours of the night, yet you may only be asleep a short duration? You may even experience multiple epics within the same night. Then you wake up in awe with the feeling as if you just read twenty whole novels in a single night! I think this is easy to find an explanation for. Its simply because you "make up" and experience the dream much faster than you can experience awake reality. Due to hierarchical abstraction of information and memory, native experiences (generated by your own mind) can be iterated on the fly. While dreaming, your mind goes through a daft relay of connections. If your dream is full of nonsense, these faulty connections are found (by comparison with "axioms" baked into your memory) and corrected during the natural process.

During awake life, you're processing external information. Miniscule observations which may already have been well abstracted and classified into your memory will only bloat your experience, inconveniently prolonged by the persistence of uncontrollable time. When you read a fictional book, its not only necessary to read and understand the words, sentences, dialogue and apply surface-level comprehension. Most importantly, you are required to run this information through a much higher pipeline of abstraction and relation, in the act of "painting a picture" around the story. In contrast, this can all happen simultaneously during a dream. Because dreams are native and your brain is not trying to integrate external information as it usually does, connections are very lively.

Evidently, the information and process of a brain are merely the substance and mechanical throughput of a massive dynamic hierarchy.

I think there are cases where people are colourblind from things wrong with their eyes, like not enough cones or rods. Theres are lots of weird things, though, like there are cases where people whom are physically blind and yet really believe that they can see. They are conscious that they see, their brain just makes stuff up on the fly.

You should watch the rest of it its really interesting and pretty incredible if you think about.

I dont think we neccesarily experience dreams faster, although I have slept seemingly for only 30 minutes and had quite long dreams. I can be in my dream and be aware of all these other dreams that I've had previously, or I can create this huge history of other dreams. Its easy to create the perception of these huge narratives as long as you arent able to probe them too deeply, although it doesnt seem that hard to create on the fly just before you get to something, like you want to read a book, and each page writes itself just before you turn it. You can only be conscious of a few things at once, so perhaps its like the rest of your brain is holding millions of things ready to be presented to you at a moments notice.

Santalum, on 4 February 2012 - 07:56 AM, said:

Well OK.

Similarly looking at individual transistors in a CPU will tell you very little about how it all works.

The problem with unravelling brain function is that there is no systematic tool, as far as I am ware, for mapping neural connections given that one neurone has many hundreds of thousands of connections to other neurons. Where as transistors have only one input and one output.

A tool will have to be developed that some how averages the connections of one neurone to the next so that the complexity is reduced to something resembling the the very simple connections between transistors.

Until such a tool is developed it will be extraordinarily difficult to unravel and comprehend all the neural pathways.



With various robots and drones that these days have very powerful CPU etc and can process detailed images to distance measurements and obstacle avoidance ect, but that lack consciousness, they are never any where near as good as a human being.

The best military drones combine powerful computers and cameras etc with the consciousness of a human operator.

Perhaps an close approximation to a human with full processing power but no consciousness is a sleep walker who liable to walk in front of a bus or off the edge off a cliff. Without a conscious human operator, an otherwise autonomous drone is very likely to do the same thing.

It is fairly obvious to me from the various documentaries I have watched over the years that the powerful processing power of the human brain is useless without consciousness to bring it all together in a coherrent manor. And indeed that it is not possible to have this sort of computing power without generating consciousness by default.

Consciousness is as much an inevitable result of the functioning of a complex and powerful brain just as speed and sound are the inevitable results of a motorcycle functioning.

Perhaps consciousness is indeed unavoidable once you go beyond a certain threshold of computer (organic or inorganic) processing power. Perhaps this is a fundamental truth of the cosmos.

They've mapped a worms brain, and are working on humans but we are slightly more complicated.

http://web.mit.edu/n...in-mapping.html


Personally I dont think consciousness is just a matter of power, otherwise we would have already found it. Consciousness I think is like an abstraction, as Ben Bowan said, it doesnt work on raw data. But not just one their are many competing abstractions.

[Ringer]

Language only affects the ways people categorize colors, not the way they are perceived. It would be like saying a professional painter can see more colors than I do because I couldn't name all the different colors that they could. There are tribes who only have words for dark and light, but I doubt they don't see any colors.

Computers can do many things much better than humans, but at the same time there are things that humans can do that is unbelievable difficult to make a computer to do. Computers have a very difficult time separating necessary movement and unnecessary movements when trying to learn goal oriented behavior although even a baby knows the difference. An example is if a computer tries to learn to open a jar by watching someone do it. If they stop to answer the door a computer may 'believe' that is part of the process. Another difference is the redundancy within brains is something very few computers even come close to.

[Santalum]

Ben Bowen, on 4 February 2012 - 07:17 PM, said:

I am dumbfounded! Its not about processing power at all.

Today's average computers are insanely faster than the human brain. Not only by computation, but also by logic and anything else consistent you throw at them. Its about hierarchy, representation, and structure! Pummeling millions of atomic pieces of information through a tree of classification and reduction, towards an ultimate abstraction. The bigger the brain, the more capable it is of developing and handling higher abstractions. Therefore, the bigger the brain, the more "intelligent" it is.

Yes it is about processing power.

And processing power is not only about speed.

Granted a computer is enormously faster than the human brain at simple mathematical etc tasks.

But computers are relative 'morons' at such enormously complex tasks like face and speech recognition where the human brain excels.

This is where the many to many connections between neurones out compute simple one to one connections between transistors despite the enormously slower speed of nerve impulses.

Ben Bowen, on 4 February 2012 - 07:17 PM, said:

Human brains sort of combine information with the means of processing (don't think of it exactly like that, but..) they have an architecture ideally capable of conscience.

Yes! Something that is unlikely to be acheived at the same level of sophistication with solid state electronics in the foreseeable future. So Please refect carefull on which is really the more powerful computer - the human brain or an intel destop computer.

Ben Bowen, on 4 February 2012 - 07:17 PM, said:

A simple algorithm might compare images by summing the red, green and blue bytes into integers (for both individual images). Then it would divide each color-component sum by the total number of pixels that were sampled, take the absolute difference of these color-component values between the two images, add them together, and divide by three. The final result should be a difference value between 0 and 255, 0 meaning they had a perfectly equal quantization of colors.

widthA = 20
heightA = 50

redA = 102000
greenA = 30600
blueA = 73950

widthB = 90
heightB = 40

redB = 357000
greenB = 153000
blueB = 229500

areaA = widthA * heightA = 20 * 50 = 1000
areaB = widthB * heightB = 90 * 40 = 3600

redA = redA / areaA = 102000 / 1000 = 102
greenA = greenA / areaA = 30600 / 1000 = 31
blueA = blueA / areaA = 73950 / 1000 = 74

redB = redB / areaB = 357000 / 3600 = 100
greenB = greenB / areaB = 153000 / 3600 = 42
blueB = blueB / areaB = 229500 / 3600 = 64

redDiff = |redA - redB| = |102 - 100| = 2
greenDiff = |greenA - greenB| = |31 - 42| = 11
blueDiff = |blueA - blueB| = |74 - 64| = 10

diffSum = redDiff + greenDiff + blueDiff = 23
diffFinal = diffSum / 3 = 23 / 3 = 7

However, this comparison is almost useless. Who would want to run a program like this on the worlds most powerful super computer? Intelligence must be capable of abstraction, and only a very particular intelligent architecture can be fully conscious as we think of ourselves. When you look at an image, "you" are far from the level of reasoning about a mere collection of colors.

I believe its possible to create machines such as self driving cars, or robots capable of reading a book and really understanding the contents, or whatever yet only humans have done to date. But depending on the architecture of the machine, it may or may not be conscious. I predict machines designed for practical efficiency purposes would not be conscious. They really could run on hardware similar to what we have now, but only to serve as extremely versatile number crunching machines. In fact, by the differences of common computer architecture and organic brains, they could be incredibly (INSANELY!) more powerful, yet just as capable of human-like things. They would only lack a conscience, and that's for the better of efficiency.

Yes computers are very good and number crunching but comparably useless at simulating any human qualities. Again which is more powerful here, the human brain or even a cray super computer.

calabi, on 4 February 2012 - 07:32 PM, said:

I think there are cases where people are colourblind from things wrong with their eyes, like not enough cones or rods. Theres are lots of weird things, though, like there are cases where people whom are physically blind and yet really believe that they can see. They are conscious that they see, their brain just makes stuff up on the fly.

You should watch the rest of it its really interesting and pretty incredible if you think about.

I dont think we neccesarily experience dreams faster, although I have slept seemingly for only 30 minutes and had quite long dreams. I can be in my dream and be aware of all these other dreams that I've had previously, or I can create this huge history of other dreams. Its easy to create the perception of these huge narratives as long as you arent able to probe them too deeply, although it doesnt seem that hard to create on the fly just before you get to something, like you want to read a book, and each page writes itself just before you turn it. You can only be conscious of a few things at once, so perhaps its like the rest of your brain is holding millions of things ready to be presented to you at a moments notice.



They've mapped a worms brain, and are working on humans but we are slightly more complicated.

http://web.mit.edu/n...in-mapping.html


Personally I dont think consciousness is just a matter of power, otherwise we would have already found it. Consciousness I think is like an abstraction, as Ben Bowan said, it doesnt work on raw data. But not just one their are many competing abstractions.

What we make of the output of a computer on the screen is an abstraction that would be meaningless coloured patterns to any other species. But ultimately it is understandable and defineable in terms of electronic architecture and is totally constant and identical no matter who or what turns the computer on.

I believe that consciousness is no different - ultimately understandable and defineable in terms of neuronal architecture.

As to whether we will ever reach that understanding of neuronal architecture is another matter entirely however.

Ringer, on 4 February 2012 - 10:57 PM, said:

Language only affects the ways people categorize colors, not the way they are perceived. It would be like saying a professional painter can see more colors than I do because I couldn't name all the different colors that they could. There are tribes who only have words for dark and light, but I doubt they don't see any colors.

Computers can do many things much better than humans, but at the same time there are things that humans can do that is unbelievable difficult to make a computer to do. Computers have a very difficult time separating necessary movement and unnecessary movements when trying to learn goal oriented behavior although even a baby knows the difference. An example is if a computer tries to learn to open a jar by watching someone do it. If they stop to answer the door a computer may 'believe' that is part of the process. Another difference is the redundancy within brains is something very few computers even come close to.

Nicely enunciated. So again we need to reflect on which is really more powerful - a brain or the fastest solid state computer.

[calabi]

Why is this forum in know way like a science forum?, we have people with assertions that go directly against evidence.

[iNow]

calabi, on 5 February 2012 - 04:09 PM, said:

Why is this forum in know way like a science forum?, we have people with assertions that go directly against evidence.

There are a bunch of people making comments about a topic they don't understand. It happens. I was thinking something similar, myself. For a thread with a title like "understanding the human brain," there sure isn't a lot of understanding being presented here.

[Santalum]

iNow, on 5 February 2012 - 04:13 PM, said:

There are a bunch of people making comments about a topic they don't understand. It happens. I was thinking something similar, myself. For a thread with a title like "understanding the human brain," there sure isn't a lot of understanding being presented here.

Perhaps, from a comment like this, both of you don't really have any understanding of brain physiology yourselves.

Because a lot of this is from cutting edge brain research and debate around it.

Why don't you read one of the inumerable books on the human brain written by respected researchers in the field.

In them you will find the computing power of the human brain being compared and contrasted to the computing power of modern computers.

In them you will find that it is widely agreed that computers are excellent at simple number crunching but very primitive at simulating even those most basic human qualities and abilities such as face recognition.

In them you will find consciousness being compared to the intended noise and speed generated by a motorcycle but none the less not being physical components of it.

All that has been discusses in this thread is entirely scientifically relevant to brain function.

I suggest you both start here: http://scienceblogs....t_like_a_co.php and here http://en.wikipedia....i/Consciousness and here http://www.time.com/...80394-1,00.html

From the first reference...

Quote

Accurate biological models of the brain would have to include some 225,000,000,000,000,000 (225 million billion) interactions between cell types, neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, axonal branches and dendritic spines, and that doesn't include the influences of dendritic geometry, or the approximately 1 trillion glial cells which may or may not be important for neural information processing. Because the brain is nonlinear, and because it is so much larger than all current computers, it seems likely that it functions in a completely different fashion. (See here for more on this.) The brain-computer metaphor obscures this important, though perhaps obvious, difference in raw computational power.

From this the computational power of the human brain is vastly greater than even our most powerful super computers, despite the fact that nerve impulse speed is vastly smaller than the speed of electrical currents. This is largely due to the fact that our brains are capable of massive parallel processing where as our computers are only capable of serial processing.

This post has been edited by Santalum: 5 February 2012 - 11:07 PM

[iNow]

Uhuh.

[DrmDoc]

calabi, on 5 February 2012 - 04:09 PM, said:

Why is this forum in know way like a science forum?, we have people with assertions that go directly against evidence.

If there is evidence contrary to an assertion, the best approach is to present that evidence plainly with your supporting sources. If a respondent cannot present a cogent rebuttle, ignores your evidence, or end his or her participation without comment, your perspective is more than likely valid. Admitting that someone's perspective is likely more valid than ours is something our massive and fragile ego will not frequently permit.

[l.boyd]

Tres Juicy, on 3 February 2012 - 09:26 AM, said:

Can you prove this?

I may well percieve the sky to be red, but since I have been taught from an early age that the name of that colour is blue I will call it blue

If you show me what you percieve to be blue, I will also call it blue

It doesn't mean we see the same thing

If what you perceive to be blue is actually red, why would you also call what the other person perceive to be blue (which may very well be brown)...blue?
You already have your own perception of blue (which is red). If the person presented you what they perceive as blue, and if it's not red (your blue), you obviously won't "also call it blue."