I guess Im randomly asking but does any of you know a trick to log back into an instagram account..? I stupidly forgot the login password. I would love any assistance you can offer me!
@Aron Jamal Thanks so much for your reply. I found the site on google and I'm trying it out atm. I see it takes a while so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.
I love the breadth & depth of topics Mindscape gets into! Given the complexity of the problems scientists are now tackling in many fields, it seems increasingly clear that a multidisciplinary understanding is going to be required to find solutions. This seems especially true for areas like neuroscience & AI. There will be no hope of having any real in depth understanding of such things without an understanding of not just psychology & computer science, but biology, chemistry, physics, materials science, and philosophy. Thanks Sean, for being one of the folks helping to move us in that direction!
55:00 i'm an animator and i think we spend a lot more time looking at hte world than the average person. when i was started doing computer graphics i spent all my time looking at objects as 3D modeling problems. i took up sculpture last year to see if my "observational skills" translated, and they do pretty much as i expected. another brilliant talk, fascinating guest, and lisa has a wonderful voice. 1::04:00 interesting, on the one hand if you say "implants into my brain" one conjures up mind control and unwanted advertising and thought police, but if you say instead "prosthetics" all of a sudden the whole implant thing has a different light, personally i'm looking forward to "brain google" as long as it's done like you would a prosthetic.
Mr. Carroll I'm a physician and I'm noticing slight intermittent left facial droop while watching your videos, which may or may not be significant. Please do yourself a favor and get checked out by a neurologist soon. Again, I'm hoping it's completely nothing but looking at your older videos it appears you do not have this and now you do.
Sean, I think having the 15 second skippable ad at the very beginning would really help with youtube promoting your channel. If you were to check your analytics, chances are that your channel is not being promotoed by the youtube algorithm, as it does not make them any revenue. You could get more followers, reach a larger audience, and impact more lives if you added it. Just a thought. Thanks for the great podcast!
Did you start with the Kip Thorne video? I think I'm noticing an upward trend :) thank you. It's frustrating when great, informative podcasts don't get the attention that needs to be given to them. Thanks again for the fantastic podcast.
Good point on the topic of mirror neurons, which I believe was first identified and explored by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran with his astonishingly simple and ingenious experiments. Hope he is well.
@@Trebleclefaudio it was Rizzolatti who identified but Ramachandran who associated it with mental disorders such as Autism and lack of empathy in psychopaths. He had ingenious ideas indeed. Richard Dawkins called him the Marco Polo of neuroscience! I hope he is good as well.
I have always been very empathetic. When my step mother was pregnant with my little brother she was experiencing severe morning sickness and while m father did not have sympathetic morning sickness, I did. She would wake up and get me up for school and prepare breakfast for me. All very normal but then I would take the bus to school and within a few hours I would get nauseated and be unable to concentrate on my class and would go to the nurse and have to go home for the rest of the day.
Me too. I got a triple serving of empathy when I went through the buffet line of life. Anything involving suffering, particularly purposefully induced .... I can't watch it or even hear about it. I will stop someone in mid sentence and tell them I don't want to hear it. It's easier to keep it from getting in your head than it is getting out once introduced. It''s not all bad though, for example I get immense joy helping people in meaningful ways.
i can't watch videos of kids falling off skateboards, i get electric shocks run through my body when they take falls. oddly i scored borderline sociopath in a test i once did. weird.
If i'm imagining an elephant holding a red balloon in its trunk then because obvs im part of the universe, so then is that image , but what is it made of and as im in the dark with my eyes closed , where then is the light coming from and how does it enter the inside of my head? Ive heard scientist talk of this before {not sure what field} but they didn't know just posed a similar question but its been bugging me since childhood. It sounds woo but shouldn't 'mind' be part of a Unified Theory of Everything?
When we walk around go to grasp something. All of the responsible neurons for that action become aware to the incoming stimuli of grabbing for something, then what we are grasping for is considered by the brain to interpret what it is that we are grabbing for and its purpose. When we stub our toe on a rock we did not see, what are the factors introduced upon stubbing the toe, or just having a collision with the leg and an object?
I know, right? And how does that trigger yelling "Goddammit! Sonofabitch that hurts. Fuck!" What is the purpose? Is it like an Emergency Alarm that tells the Repair Cells to stop the card game and get their asses to the accident scene PRONTO! Or is it nothing more than dog cussing external reality for being such a bully asshole. When you think about it, being alive is just another way of saying that the universe hasn't killed you....yet.
@@seriouskaraoke879 Fun theory... Cussing when you stub your toe or something similar actually helps with the pain. The Royal Society done a little experiment where people had to put their hands in a tub of water full of ice, one group could cuss and the other group could say random words as long as it wasn't a cuss word, the result was that the people who cussed could keep their hands in the ice a lot longer and didn't feel as much pain as the other group. This was a small sample size so... ??? I do think there's something to it though. Thoughts?
@@jamesyboy4626 -- Oh I'm certain you are right. I always feel better after a good cussing. But I'm not advocating that. A lifetime of cussing left me with a bad hip that should be replaced. Saying "Fuck" fifty times and day in all its derivations; for forty years? Friend, that shit adds up. I tried to cut back and switched to cussing in Spanish. Ya know, like switching to a beer brand you don't like to cut down on drinking? No, of course it didn't work. I had no choice it seemed. I was on crutches and replacement surgery was scheduled. The surgeon was purportedly the best hip replacement surgeon in the SouthWest. Handsome fellow, cocksure, calling the shots. He asked me if I smoke, said yep, drink, yep. " Well not for the next 10 weeks you're not or the 10 weeks after surgery. I wan't my surgery to have the best possible chance to heal right. "Do I gotta give up cussing too?" He smiled his cocksure smile and said, "Who knows, maybe you'll give up both? And start a new life?" I was supposed to do all this CYA testing and have that to them four weeks before Surgery. Somebody fucked up and dropped the ball. Surgery was just days away, WHERE THE FUCK IS THE CYA TEST RESULTS!!!!!!! I never got them. Decided not to go through with it before I left his office, just didn't bother to tell them or take their call. I just texted "After a thorough review of my options, I've decided on the "Miracle Option". Seriously, nobody uses that option anymore because they assume that miracle means a God intervention summoned by prayer,. FUCK THAT! Just thinking about that God prick could queer my chance for one of the legitimate "The Universe Is Random as Fuck" Miracles. Would you believe, two years later, no crutches, no cane, can't get an erection anymore but I'm walking without pain and cussing like a sailor.
Regarding how cognition can be thought of as extending past the boundary of the brain, .. Sadhguru's answer to the question 'Why meditation doesn't work for many people' has a great example of this at the 3m42s mark! So if the research is now showing that the brain is much more top-down thinking, than bottom-up.. does it still hold that most of the brain energy is utilized on subconscious/sensory tasks? Jeff Phillips (Stem Talk #78 49m mark) mentions how mindfulness may provide the access for higher order processes to control autonomic/sympathetic processes.. it comes to mind, the portal analogy that Eric Weinstein makes with the square root of -1 being the question that jumps you from the physical into the imaginary world (JRE #1203 1h19m)! Is there any connection between 'embodied cognition' and the Polyvagal Theory by Dr Stephen Porges?
Very interesting conversation, I like it. However, it keeps being assert that we have "maps in our brains", I don't think the evidence supports that. It's true we can map what areas of the brain are active or even register touch or movement but that's mapping of the brain not a map in the brain. Maps are representations, why would the brain need to represent something? Certain neurons are activated (or inactivated) when say our left thumb touches something. Changes in those neurons are the feeling, they don't represent the feeling. It seems to me positing representations is to posit something reading those representations, a sneaky form of dualism.
There is nothing mysterious or dualistic about representations. My job is to write programs that learn to represent things. If a neuron fires when our left thumb touches something, that neuron is (part of) a representation of the thumb; in general, if a set of neurons communicate with each other in exactly the same way that some features in the world relate with each other, then that set of neurons is representing an object with those features. For example, say there are 10 neurons representing the concept "apple"; when you see, smell and taste 3 different apples, the 10 neurons together form 3 different patterns (maybe the "apple color" neuron is respectively red, green and yellow, like the actual color of apples). Representations are the bread-and-butter of cognition, and we know how and why ordinary matter can represent things - no sneaky dualism.
@@franszdyb4507 Who or what is the neuron representing the thumb to? The answer to that question is the sneaky dualism of representations in your head. What's the point of positing a representation when nothing ever sees it? Programs use numbers to represent things, and those numbers are what the algorithm operates on. But brains are not computers, they do not have a program, in a brain there is no distinction between data, operations and hardware. Brains are lumps of cells and chemicals however we can't understand them using chemical reactions. We use a different level of description, cognitive scientists might use representations to talk about how the brain works but those representations are in the description, not in the brain. Representations are stand ins or descriptions but the nervous system doesn't need a stand in, it's directly wired to the thumb. Yes neurons fire when you thumb touches something but your nervous system doesn't need to build a representation to show to a little you inside your head. Those neuron firing is your perception of the event. Those neurons might cause other neurons to fire causing a long change of neurons firing, maybe even neurons to your muscles that produce your reaction to the event. It's all physical. Sticking a representations and representation readers in that explanation only make it more complicated with no added benefit.
@@myothersoul1953 If you zoomed in enough on your computer's motherboard, the distinction between data, operation and hardware would also disappear. In the end, all that is happening is that electric current is passing through a lot of transistors. But because the pattern of transistor switches changes in a consistent way according to the rules that the engineers had in mind when they designed the circuits, the circuit is said to compute things and encode/represent information. You could predict everything that goes on in a computer using solid-state physics, but you wouldn't understand it at all. If you did do the predictions on the level of transistors, you would have a huge mess of "this current would go here if this current went there", and the only way to make sense of it, would be to cluster these predictions into larger patterns, until it became evident that the patterns are not a by-product of your sense-making, but the whole point of the computer. Some patterns of current would be "representations of the input", other patterns would be "internal representations", some patterns would even represent parts of the computer itself. Neuroscience has the job of understanding an unknown computer architecture, designed by trial and error. You can say that the brain doesn't need representations, and doesn't have them; you can also say a computer doesn't have representations, it just has transistors. You may even be able to predict some of the brain's activity without invoking representations, if you have a powerful computer and no life. But you won't understand what the brain is doing, the point of it. The point of the brain is to maintain the body and move it around. You can't do that without representing the body and the world that it moves around in. Even a flatworm has one of its 302 neurons for representing itself. Like you said, it's all about levels of description; on the lowest level, it's all excitations in quantum fields. You may say representations are only in the description, not in the brain. But then you also have to say that there is no brain, there are no proteins, no molecules and no atoms. Those are also higher-level descriptions just as much as neural representations.
@@franszdyb4507"Neuroscience has the job of understanding an unknown computer architecture.." Zoom in on that mother board again, see all those parallel lines, that's a bus, it brings data from the memory to other memory possible a register in the CPU. The CPU does logical operations on the data. There is nothing like that in the brain. Yes computers are just transistors, wires and other assorted circuity and brains are just neurons, glial cells and other biology. There are very different things. Computers were designed to do computation, there transistors are arranged to make the logical gates that enable computation and they compute very well. Brains were not designed and are not all that good at computation or logic. On all of that I think we agree. When you want to do computation representation is a great thing to have. All of measurement is representation, assigning numbers to things is very powerful. But the brain doesn't do that. Neither do combustion engines. I suppose you could say the fuel and 02 going into the piston represents the energy produced in that cycle but why bother, it's just making things needlessly complicated. The piston doesn't need the representation to know how much kinetic energy it has. Someone could write a program and have numbers represent the fuel and O2 mixture and other numbers to represent a formula to compute the energy produced. Computers were built for just such operations. The transistors don't care any more than neurons do but the transistors were put in a structure designed to represent things and do calculations, neurons were not. "The point of the brain is to maintain the body and move it around. You can't do that without representing ..." Yes you can, your brain can do all those things directly, just as your car can move without representing it’s fuel mixture. Sure we can use representation to talk about how the brain functions but the representations are a feature or our descriptions, not a feature in the brain. Brains are not computers, they don’t do computation.
@@myothersoul1953 Logic gates are one of the easiest things to build out of neurons, it's actually a common beginner exercise in machine learning courses. Using more realistic neuron models, you can represent things and remember sequences. I've done these exercises, so I've seen the truth of this for myself. The brain is not digital or serial or designed, but it's computing nonetheless - it is processing information encoded in neuron spike trains and other patterns. It may be hard to imagine how an organ that processes information can evolve. But even single celled organisms process information about their surroundings to keep track of pressure, temperature and the presence of nutrients. The "predictive processing" theory explains how biological systems are bound to end up representing the world in pursuit of minimizing prediction error. I think if you read about this, it might convince you. A car and its pistons don't represent anything, because your brain is there for that purpose - but a self driving car certainly does represent its surroundings and itself using on-board computers!
What is up with people who say some version of ' Yeah, so...' or ' Um, so...' to start every sentence? I think they are so beta that they want to sound as neutral as possible. Truly wondering.
If you can't understand the original question, it is nothing to be embarrassed about. I don't care to trade stereotype sound -bytes with you. @@TheXitone
I really like her laughter! Interesting topic as well. Enough tanguents to not be dry
Very interesting research and discussion here. And I love Lisa's voice.
I guess Im randomly asking but does any of you know a trick to log back into an instagram account..?
I stupidly forgot the login password. I would love any assistance you can offer me!
@Reuben Armani Instablaster =)
@Aron Jamal Thanks so much for your reply. I found the site on google and I'm trying it out atm.
I see it takes a while so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.
@Aron Jamal It worked and I actually got access to my account again. I'm so happy:D
Thanks so much, you really help me out !
@Reuben Armani You are welcome :D
I love the breadth & depth of topics Mindscape gets into!
Given the complexity of the problems scientists are now tackling
in many fields, it seems increasingly clear that a multidisciplinary
understanding is going to be required to find solutions. This seems especially
true for areas like neuroscience & AI. There will be no hope of having any
real in depth understanding of such things without an understanding of not just
psychology & computer science, but biology, chemistry, physics, materials
science, and philosophy.
Thanks Sean, for being one of the folks helping to move us
in that direction!
55:00 i'm an animator and i think we spend a lot more time looking at hte world than the average person. when i was started doing computer graphics i spent all my time looking at objects as 3D modeling problems. i took up sculpture last year to see if my "observational skills" translated, and they do pretty much as i expected. another brilliant talk, fascinating guest, and lisa has a wonderful voice.
1::04:00 interesting, on the one hand if you say "implants into my brain" one conjures up mind control and unwanted advertising and thought police, but if you say instead "prosthetics" all of a sudden the whole implant thing has a different light, personally i'm looking forward to "brain google" as long as it's done like you would a prosthetic.
In the parallel universe where Sean is my best friend and Lisa is my wife, I’m sure I’m so happy. Damn my current position in the multiverse!!! 😕
I keep thinking surely in one i win the lottery so please can it be this one !
Lol!
haha so trueee
My grandfather, a prominent gastroenterologist, was one of the first to suggest that ulcers have a gut(entero)bacterial connection.
My Grandfather played in a very early version of Lawrence Welk's band playing barn dances..
I'm calling this a fair fight. Taking bets.
@@thorkrynu4551 My Grandpa smoked a pipe, spoke Scots Gaelic and was a street fighting champion.
@@TheXitone hold on one fight at a time
@@TheXitone my dad was a spiritualist, and he still is, just nowhere visible.
You didn't talk about what mirror neurons do when one stares into the mirror at oneself! Can you rig a mirror up to into an MRI machine?
Mr. Carroll I'm a physician and I'm noticing slight intermittent left facial droop while watching your videos, which may or may not be significant. Please do yourself a favor and get checked out by a neurologist soon. Again, I'm hoping it's completely nothing but looking at your older videos it appears you do not have this and now you do.
Please do an AMA!
14:00 I wonder if the top down/bottom up processing changes with age as we learn?
Explains why yawning is so "contagious."
Excellent episode! Really interesting topic and an awesome quest!
Sean, I think having the 15 second skippable ad at the very beginning would really help with youtube promoting your channel. If you were to check your analytics, chances are that your channel is not being promotoed by the youtube algorithm, as it does not make them any revenue. You could get more followers, reach a larger audience, and impact more lives if you added it. Just a thought. Thanks for the great podcast!
Interesting idea. I might give it a try.
Did you start with the Kip Thorne video? I think I'm noticing an upward trend :) thank you. It's frustrating when great, informative podcasts don't get the attention that needs to be given to them. Thanks again for the fantastic podcast.
Hi Sean! Please also bring Dr. V.S Ramachandran on your podcast next!
Good point on the topic of mirror neurons, which I believe was first identified and explored by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran with his astonishingly simple and ingenious experiments. Hope he is well.
@@Trebleclefaudio it was Rizzolatti who identified but Ramachandran who associated it with mental disorders such as Autism and lack of empathy in psychopaths. He had ingenious ideas indeed. Richard Dawkins called him the Marco Polo of neuroscience! I hope he is good as well.
Ramachandran's Ted Talk on phantom limb therapy is quite good.
I have always been very empathetic. When my step mother was pregnant with my little brother she was experiencing severe morning sickness and while m father did not have sympathetic morning sickness, I did. She would wake up and get me up for school and prepare breakfast for me. All very normal but then I would take the bus to school and within a few hours I would get nauseated and be unable to concentrate on my class and would go to the nurse and have to go home for the rest of the day.
Me too. I got a triple serving of empathy when I went through the buffet line of life. Anything involving suffering, particularly purposefully induced .... I can't watch it or even hear about it. I will stop someone in mid sentence and tell them I don't want to hear it. It's easier to keep it from getting in your head than it is getting out once introduced. It''s not all bad though, for example I get immense joy helping people in meaningful ways.
i can't watch videos of kids falling off skateboards, i get electric shocks run through my body when they take falls. oddly i scored borderline sociopath in a test i once did. weird.
If i'm imagining an elephant holding a red balloon in its trunk then because obvs im part of the universe, so then is that image , but what is it made of and as im in the dark with my eyes closed , where then is the light coming from and how does it enter the inside of my head? Ive heard scientist talk of this before {not sure what field} but they didn't know just posed a similar question but its been bugging me since childhood. It sounds woo but shouldn't 'mind' be part of a Unified Theory of Everything?
10:00 "Ruprecht, stop prodding that brain and take it out of the tank! I'm wasting my time"
When we walk around go to grasp something. All of the responsible neurons for that action become aware to the incoming stimuli of grabbing for something, then what we are grasping for is considered by the brain to interpret what it is that we are grabbing for and its purpose. When we stub our toe on a rock we did not see, what are the factors introduced upon stubbing the toe, or just having a collision with the leg and an object?
I know, right? And how does that trigger yelling "Goddammit! Sonofabitch that hurts. Fuck!" What is the purpose? Is it like an Emergency Alarm that tells the Repair Cells to stop the card game and get their asses to the accident scene PRONTO! Or is it nothing more than dog cussing external reality for being such a bully asshole.
When you think about it, being alive is just another way of saying that the universe hasn't killed you....yet.
@@seriouskaraoke879 Fun theory... Cussing when you stub your toe or something similar actually helps with the pain. The Royal Society done a little experiment where people had to put their hands in a tub of water full of ice, one group could cuss and the other group could say random words as long as it wasn't a cuss word, the result was that the people who cussed could keep their hands in the ice a lot longer and didn't feel as much pain as the other group. This was a small sample size so... ???
I do think there's something to it though. Thoughts?
@@jamesyboy4626 -- Oh I'm certain you are right. I always feel better after a good cussing. But I'm not advocating that. A lifetime of cussing left me with a bad hip that should be replaced. Saying "Fuck" fifty times and day in all its derivations; for forty years? Friend, that shit adds up. I tried to cut back and switched to cussing in Spanish. Ya know, like switching to a beer brand you don't like to cut down on drinking? No, of course it didn't work.
I had no choice it seemed. I was on crutches and replacement surgery was scheduled. The surgeon was purportedly the best hip replacement surgeon in the SouthWest. Handsome fellow, cocksure, calling the shots. He asked me if I smoke, said yep, drink, yep. " Well not for the next 10 weeks you're not or the 10 weeks after surgery. I wan't my surgery to have the best possible chance to heal right. "Do I gotta give up cussing too?" He smiled his cocksure smile and said, "Who knows, maybe you'll give up both? And start a new life?"
I was supposed to do all this CYA testing and have that to them four weeks before Surgery. Somebody fucked up and dropped the ball. Surgery was just days away, WHERE THE FUCK IS THE CYA TEST RESULTS!!!!!!! I never got them. Decided not to go through with it before I left his office, just didn't bother to tell them or take their call. I just texted "After a thorough review of my options, I've decided on the "Miracle Option".
Seriously, nobody uses that option anymore because they assume that miracle means a God intervention summoned by prayer,. FUCK THAT! Just thinking about that God prick could queer my chance for one of the legitimate "The Universe Is Random as Fuck" Miracles. Would you believe, two years later, no crutches, no cane, can't get an erection anymore but I'm walking without pain and cussing like a sailor.
What is the actually the question? What kind of factors?
Regarding how cognition can be thought of as extending past the boundary of the brain, .. Sadhguru's answer to the question 'Why meditation doesn't work for many people' has a great example of this at the 3m42s mark!
So if the research is now showing that the brain is much more top-down thinking, than bottom-up.. does it still hold that most of the brain energy is utilized on subconscious/sensory tasks? Jeff Phillips (Stem Talk #78 49m mark) mentions how mindfulness may provide the access for higher order processes to control autonomic/sympathetic processes.. it comes to mind, the portal analogy that Eric Weinstein makes with the square root of -1 being the question that jumps you from the physical into the imaginary world (JRE #1203 1h19m)!
Is there any connection between 'embodied cognition' and the Polyvagal Theory by Dr Stephen Porges?
Great episode !! Thanks :)
Per my Mirror Neurons: Dude, Sweet! Castle Rock, Stephen King and Lisa merged with panache..
I appreciate the knowledge thank you.
Very interesting conversation, I like it. However, it keeps being assert that we have "maps in our brains", I don't think the evidence supports that. It's true we can map what areas of the brain are active or even register touch or movement but that's mapping of the brain not a map in the brain. Maps are representations, why would the brain need to represent something? Certain neurons are activated (or inactivated) when say our left thumb touches something. Changes in those neurons are the feeling, they don't represent the feeling. It seems to me positing representations is to posit something reading those representations, a sneaky form of dualism.
There is nothing mysterious or dualistic about representations. My job is to write programs that learn to represent things. If a neuron fires when our left thumb touches something, that neuron is (part of) a representation of the thumb; in general, if a set of neurons communicate with each other in exactly the same way that some features in the world relate with each other, then that set of neurons is representing an object with those features. For example, say there are 10 neurons representing the concept "apple"; when you see, smell and taste 3 different apples, the 10 neurons together form 3 different patterns (maybe the "apple color" neuron is respectively red, green and yellow, like the actual color of apples). Representations are the bread-and-butter of cognition, and we know how and why ordinary matter can represent things - no sneaky dualism.
@@franszdyb4507 Who or what is the neuron representing the thumb to?
The answer to that question is the sneaky dualism of representations in your head. What's the point of positing a representation when nothing ever sees it?
Programs use numbers to represent things, and those numbers are what the algorithm operates on. But brains are not computers, they do not have a program, in a brain there is no distinction between data, operations and hardware. Brains are lumps of cells and chemicals however we can't understand them using chemical reactions. We use a different level of description, cognitive scientists might use representations to talk about how the brain works but those representations are in the description, not in the brain.
Representations are stand ins or descriptions but the nervous system doesn't need a stand in, it's directly wired to the thumb. Yes neurons fire when you thumb touches something but your nervous system doesn't need to build a representation to show to a little you inside your head. Those neuron firing is your perception of the event. Those neurons might cause other neurons to fire causing a long change of neurons firing, maybe even neurons to your muscles that produce your reaction to the event. It's all physical. Sticking a representations and representation readers in that explanation only make it more complicated with no added benefit.
@@myothersoul1953 If you zoomed in enough on your computer's motherboard, the distinction between data, operation and hardware would also disappear. In the end, all that is happening is that electric current is passing through a lot of transistors. But because the pattern of transistor switches changes in a consistent way according to the rules that the engineers had in mind when they designed the circuits, the circuit is said to compute things and encode/represent information.
You could predict everything that goes on in a computer using solid-state physics, but you wouldn't understand it at all. If you did do the predictions on the level of transistors, you would have a huge mess of "this current would go here if this current went there", and the only way to make sense of it, would be to cluster these predictions into larger patterns, until it became evident that the patterns are not a by-product of your sense-making, but the whole point of the computer. Some patterns of current would be "representations of the input", other patterns would be "internal representations", some patterns would even represent parts of the computer itself.
Neuroscience has the job of understanding an unknown computer architecture, designed by trial and error. You can say that the brain doesn't need representations, and doesn't have them; you can also say a computer doesn't have representations, it just has transistors. You may even be able to predict some of the brain's activity without invoking representations, if you have a powerful computer and no life. But you won't understand what the brain is doing, the point of it.
The point of the brain is to maintain the body and move it around. You can't do that without representing the body and the world that it moves around in. Even a flatworm has one of its 302 neurons for representing itself. Like you said, it's all about levels of description; on the lowest level, it's all excitations in quantum fields. You may say representations are only in the description, not in the brain. But then you also have to say that there is no brain, there are no proteins, no molecules and no atoms. Those are also higher-level descriptions just as much as neural representations.
@@franszdyb4507"Neuroscience has the job of understanding an unknown computer architecture.."
Zoom in on that mother board again, see all those parallel lines, that's a bus, it brings data from the memory to other memory possible a register in the CPU. The CPU does logical operations on the data. There is nothing like that in the brain. Yes computers are just transistors, wires and other assorted circuity and brains are just neurons, glial cells and other biology. There are very different things. Computers were designed to do computation, there transistors are arranged to make the logical gates that enable computation and they compute very well. Brains were not designed and are not all that good at computation or logic. On all of that I think we agree.
When you want to do computation representation is a great thing to have. All of measurement is representation, assigning numbers to things is very powerful. But the brain doesn't do that. Neither do combustion engines. I suppose you could say the fuel and 02 going into the piston represents the energy produced in that cycle but why bother, it's just making things needlessly complicated. The piston doesn't need the representation to know how much kinetic energy it has.
Someone could write a program and have numbers represent the fuel and O2 mixture and other numbers to represent a formula to compute the energy produced. Computers were built for just such operations. The transistors don't care any more than neurons do but the transistors were put in a structure designed to represent things and do calculations, neurons were not.
"The point of the brain is to maintain the body and move it around. You can't do that without representing ..." Yes you can, your brain can do all those things directly, just as your car can move without representing it’s fuel mixture. Sure we can use representation to talk about how the brain functions but the representations are a feature or our descriptions, not a feature in the brain. Brains are not computers, they don’t do computation.
@@myothersoul1953 Logic gates are one of the easiest things to build out of neurons, it's actually a common beginner exercise in machine learning courses. Using more realistic neuron models, you can represent things and remember sequences. I've done these exercises, so I've seen the truth of this for myself. The brain is not digital or serial or designed, but it's computing nonetheless - it is processing information encoded in neuron spike trains and other patterns. It may be hard to imagine how an organ that processes information can evolve. But even single celled organisms process information about their surroundings to keep track of pressure, temperature and the presence of nutrients. The "predictive processing" theory explains how biological systems are bound to end up representing the world in pursuit of minimizing prediction error. I think if you read about this, it might convince you.
A car and its pistons don't represent anything, because your brain is there for that purpose - but a self driving car certainly does represent its surroundings and itself using on-board computers!
as always, very interesting! :D
What is up with people who say some version of ' Yeah, so...' or ' Um, so...' to start every sentence? I think they are so beta that they want to sound as neutral as possible. Truly wondering.
so Beta? Think you turned the wrong corner after Alex Jones channel .Truly .
Typical SJW mentality. It is a legit question using a legit term. @@TheXitone
@@noahway13 red-pilled Alpha man you is woke.
If you can't understand the original question, it is nothing to be embarrassed about. I don't care to trade stereotype sound -bytes with you. @@TheXitone
@@noahway13 so um yea im not embarrassed im just so beta and not in your intellectual league i offer you my humble apple-OGs.
I like this podcast but drilling into monkeys' brains seems cruel.
She sighs in every other question
First cause I'm off work
2nd because I'm at work.
3rd, cuz I'm not working at work
Lazy bastards! 4th (cause I'm texting and driving) 🤪
5th because I felt like it.
Last because my laptop wouldn't "work" then I went to "work" and put in some "work" until lunch time when I finally got my laptop to "work"
thanks for the show- hard to listen to this woman. its like listening to a parrot. get off her script and she seems clueless. imo . thanks anyway.