One can not really know how to use mathematics properly if he does not really study it. He has to rely on mathematicians to tell him what to do. It is somewhat slavish.
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- Thread starter Tonymai
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One can not really know how to use mathematics properly if he does not really study it. He has to rely on mathematicians to tell him what to do. It is somewhat slavish.
Photonic
Ad astra!
No one is keeping you from learning it if you deem it necessary...
I'm not seeing where mathematics needs to be known here though.
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
To convert out of atanu's slightly over-mystical language, you don't need to know you know mathematics in order to deduce truths from it.
Has science invented a fine enough tool to touch spirit?
Poetry and art touches spirit.
ManTimeForgot
Temporally Challenged
Excellent question: "What else is missing?" Brains are not actually capable of better memory potential. With distributed processing and distributed storage we have systems today that have a great deal more storage capacity than the brain (by a large amount). If you look at the actual processing speed of the brain it is actually quite a bit slower than modern computers; what the brain is actually good at is parallel processing. The brain parallel processes many times better than current computing standards.
Things to consider: The brain is an auto-associative network of immense complexity; our brain's pattern matching "software" (how is this "software" constructed and where does it originate?) is capable of collating and assessing and associating incomplete patterns at a remarkable rate and do so with an accuracy we cannot match with our neural network analogues. Near death experiences do not seem to have fully physiological causes; stick someone in a G-simulator and spin them until blood flow stops going to the brain and brain activity stops, and we have never once had someone report back a near death experience (something else is going on in people who have near death experiences; or post death in the cases where the person is declared clinically dead). How do you propose to test for self-awareness? What properties would you use to distinguish something interacting with their environment via rote methodology from something which was aware of their own awareness and thus capable of updating their methodologies?
MTF
Looncall
Well-Known Member
I am amazed at the furious intellectual tap-dancing going on in this discussion; all in order to make room for souls.
One thing that keeps cropping up is that old deadly error of reification. I think that by now it is clear that minds are processes, not substances. Why religiously-inclined folks find it hard to grasp the difference, I don't know. It is like asking where the calculation goes when you turn off the computer.
Further, quantum mechanics is not an unlimited licence for fuzzy-minded mysticism.
A paraphrase comes to mind: "There are fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your theology."
One thing that keeps cropping up is that old deadly error of reification. I think that by now it is clear that minds are processes, not substances. Why religiously-inclined folks find it hard to grasp the difference, I don't know. It is like asking where the calculation goes when you turn off the computer.
Further, quantum mechanics is not an unlimited licence for fuzzy-minded mysticism.
A paraphrase comes to mind: "There are fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your theology."
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Ozzie
Well-Known Member
Correlation observed by a normally amnesic "ghost in the machine" is valuable info.
FranklinMichaelV.3
Well-Known Member
During near death experiences isn't there a chemical released that stimulates an almost hallucengienic effect?
They are.
If we define memory in terms of the capacity to store information, then we can get a better handle on this question. Information was formally defined by Shannon in 1948 or 49, and he did it by borrowing terms from physics even though at that point physicists themselves had gotten farther & farther away from using information. Now, information theory has come to dominate the literature in many realms of physics, from the very theoretical (e.g., black holes, causal paradoxes, etc.) to the extremely practical (e.g., Shor's algorithm, current progress in quantum computers and the entire field of quantum computing itself). But the formalization of information remains more or less unchanged. It is a measure of uncertainty dependent upon possible configuration states. Binary units of information are physical systems, whether voltage of near 0 or near e.g., 2.5 in a CMOS transistor or heads/tails of a penny, which have only 2 possible configurations.
Computers, as just about everyone knows, somehow store information as 0's an 1's (how they do this is both less well-known an unimportant; for one thing, binary units of information in a computer may have nothing whatsoever to do with memory or data storage). The brain does not. The closest equivalent of a "bit" in the brain is the neuron. It is the one "unit" that relates to information representation in the brain and that we can point to knowing full well that it's activity is how the brain processes information (even though we don't actually know what the "neural code" is). But it is not a unit of information.
Figuring out how much information a computer can store is pretty simple. My laptop tells me that I have about 4 gigs of RAM and ~600 gigs of hard drive space. But a computer can store terabytes of information easily. As a byte is 8 bits, and a terabyte is a trillion bytes, we're getting into trillions and trillions of bits for a good computer.
Meanwhile, there are only about ~100 billion neurons in the human brain. Clearly, it would seem, the computer wins. But as stated above, no neuron corresponds to a unit of information. In fact, information isn't stored by neurons but by constantly active patterns of neuronal activity. A single cortical neuron can connect to ~100,000 other neurons. There are ~20 billion cortical neurons, each one with configuration states ranging from ~10,000 to 10x that number. So for the sake of simplicity, let's treat the cortex as the entire brain an then go with the upper level # connections: 100,000. That gives us a vastly underestimated number of about 2^14 configuration states for each neuron.
Even my laptop, which is limited to gigabytes (each 2^30), outstrips this just with RAM, and outstrips it by far. But we aren't done. Because possible configuration states of neurons in terms of connections just provides us a way to get to how much information the brain can store. The brain fires slowly. But the speed of computers is necessarily distinct from storage. Computers are built, from the ground up, to deliberately separate individual systems and organize them in a hierarchal manner. The processor that accesses memory is distinct from memory, and in general the faster the processor can alter bits that are some component of stored data, the smaller that system is (e.g., memory internal to modern processors store far less than RAM).
In the brain, memory is represented by the processor itself. In practical terms, human "memory" is indistinct from human cognition/thought. Both are the product of constantly active patterns of neuronal activity. The activity in question ranges (probably) from individual spike trains received at some junction (in one of up to around the ~100,000 possible junctions of a single neuron) to correlations between firing sequences of several neurons involving millions of action potentials per "unit" of meaningful information (meaningful/non-meaningful information is comparable to the actual state of the physical system that "is" the bit- it really isn't in one of two binary states as e.g., voltages near 0 are treated as 0, and thus numerous possible states are treated as only 1 "meaningful" unit of information).
What this means is that neural populations "store" information through configuration states of billions of action potentials per meaningful unit. So while computers use binary units as the minimal unit, brains tend to encode memories as consisting of units that are often billion-ary, not binary (an n-ary system with an arity value in which n frequently is in the millions and billions).
The total amount of information we can store in a computer is just like possible permutations of heads/tails of in a sequence of n pennies where the number of pennies is equal to the number of bits. The sequences give us the measure of uncertainty- they tell us how many potential configuration states there are. This is a large number, but is tiny compared to the brain (the brain's has an infinite number of possible states). Information is "stored" as constantly shifting patterns of connections that is so large and complex a single neuron can alter the physical basis for the pattern in 100,000 different ways per second. This physical basis isn't the number of ways that a neuron can change the pattern, but because the pattern depends upon the number of connections this number tells us, roughly, where a single neuron can alter the firing pattern corresponding to some datum.
Not really. What's slower is the firing rate:
"The biological “hardware” on which the brain is based is extremely slow. A typical interval between the spikes of an individual neuron is about 50 ms and the time needed to propagate a signal from one neuron to another is not much shorter than such an interval. This corresponds to a characteristic frequency of merely 100 Hz. Recalling that modern digital computers should operate at a frequency of 10^9 Hz and yet are not able to reproduce its main functions, we are lead to conclude that the brain should work in a way fundamentally different from digital information processing." (emphasis added)
From Manrubia et al. (2004). Emergence of Dynamical Order : Synchronization Phenomena in Complex Systems. World Scientific Publishing Co., p 312
The brain has no "software". That's one reason I agree with Zoltan Torey here. In his book Crucible of Consciousness in the chapter “Mind versus the Computer” we find:
“The asymmetry between the brain and the computer is complete, all comparisons are flawed, and the idea of a computer-generated consciousness is nonsense.” (emphasis added)
That's because long before blood flow stops completely, the person is already dead.
We know the physical mechanisms that enable procedural learning. In fact, we know them so well we have been reproducing them using computers for years and years. Conceptual processing, however, is fundamentally different and we have know idea how it is done nor are we close to making anything that can do it.
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