[HN Gopher] Mental phenomena don't map into the brain as expected
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Mental phenomena don't map into the brain as expected
Author : theafh
Score : 140 points
Date : 2021-08-24 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| ElFitz wrote:
| Which basically means the brain doesn't think the way the brain
| thinks the brain thinks.
|
| Aside from the horrible phrasing, it's quite funny to think
| about, leading us to:
|
| My brain thinks it is funny to think about how the brain doesn't
| think the way the brain thinks the brain thinks.
|
| In the same way that atoms don't exactly work the way the atoms
| think the atoms work since, as Niels Bohr said, "A physicist is
| just an atom's way of looking at itself."
|
| Reminds me of some comment I heard somewhere, about how the brain
| and the body don't come with an instruction manual, and how it
| makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: we so far
| apparently haven't needed to know how they work to use them well
| enough to survive.
| wintorez wrote:
| "If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them,
| we'd be so simple that we couldn't."
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Hmm, but perhaps we could manage to understand the brain and
| behavior of a fruitfly or even a mouse. The "self-conscious"
| tier is trivial recursion. Hofstadter has this right in "I Am
| A Strange Loop".
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Funny, I began reading Yudkowsky's "Map and Territory", in the
| preface there is this sentence:
|
| > For if you can't trust your brain, can you trust anything
| else?
|
| Which basically means, if the brain can't trust the brain, can
| the brain trust another brain?
|
| Yes slightly tortured, but only to fit :D
| ElFitz wrote:
| Haha! Nice one!
|
| We are starting to slide into Cartesian doubt here.
| d0mine wrote:
| For me it is more mandane: there were times when people thought
| of human health in terms of 4 elements. [Much] Later they
| discovered germ theory that uses more useful concepts.
|
| Using "memory", "perception" to describe how the brain works is
| like using 4 elements to describe how our bodies function.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Sure. But let's take the average computer user's analogy from
| another comment [1].
|
| A random, average smartphone can use their device every day,
| and accomplish a great number of things without knowing how
| it actually works at all.
|
| For all they care, it could be powered by tiny fairies
| running in wheels like hamsters, and the Internet and cell
| networks could be irascible spirits connecting all
| smartphones together through a worldwide mycelium network.
|
| Knowing _how_ smartphones and computers is not necessary for
| them to accomplish what they set to.
|
| The same way, if we actually needed to have a deeper
| understanding of our own inner workings to gain a noticeable
| survival edge, evolution would probably have taken care of
| that, the same way it has endowed nearly all of us with at
| least a basic survival instinct. By eliminating most
| individuals who don't feel any need to eat food or drink
| water from the gene pool.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28292418
| novok wrote:
| Newtons theory of gravity and mechanics and such did explain
| things, just not as accurately as general & special
| relativity did. But we still use newtons formulas today as a
| good enough approximation in many cases.
|
| I have a feeling concepts like memory and perception will
| still be used in the future, even when we figure out the
| equivalent of general relativity for the brain in the future
| too, especially since they are more higher level summation
| phenomena, like personality, or higher level languages vs.
| asm.
| civilized wrote:
| Except the four element theory was rendered irrelevant by the
| germ theory. I doubt that understanding the brain will render
| memory and perception irrelevant.
|
| Robots literally have memory and perception (we know because
| we built them), so clearly these are real phenomena that
| exist in the real world.
|
| It seems to me unlikely that we are totally mistaken in
| conceptualizing ourselves in terms of these known real
| phenomena.
| mistermann wrote:
| My intuition is that it isn't totally mistaken, more so
| that it is a massive simplification.
|
| Whereas we seem to describe the brain as having "memory",
| as if that is something statically stored that is _simply_
| "retrieved" (somehow), it seems to me that this overlooks
| that the device that is doing this is also running an
| entire virtual model of simulated reality, which can not
| only _remember_ things, but it can replay them, change
| variables and play them again, play them in reverse,
| manufacture completely fictional scenarios, run (as its
| default) a custom modified variation of "actual" reality
| that it finds more pleasing (this one has gotten lots of
| news coverage in the last few years), read the contents of
| realities running inside other minds (tens of millions if
| it so chooses), see into the future of "actual" reality,
| all sorts of different things.
|
| "Brains have memory" is _a bit of an understatement_ of
| what they actually do.
| civilized wrote:
| > "Brains have memory" is a bit of an understatement of
| what they actually do.
|
| ...but, I don't think anyone thinks that "brains have
| memory" is a complete statement of what they actually do.
| It's not a complete statement of what computers do
| either.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Four element theory is on approximately the same
| epistemological plane as modern personality psychology. In
| some ways it's more useful than psychology, because it has
| a straightforward logic in terms of metaphor and
| relationships between parts, whereas psychology is a mess.
| Of course, it has very little to do with how the brain
| works, but psychology also has very little to do with how
| the brain works (it's more about the use of language to
| describe and regulate behavior), so it's not a big deal.
| mrtksn wrote:
| We build robots the way that we think things are supposed
| to work. It may turn out that our design is fundamentally
| limited.
| jraph wrote:
| I was annoyed by the phrasing of the submission, which could
| have been "The way the brain thinks is counter-intuitive"
| (don't assume I don't know what you are going to tell, or,
| conversely, that I spent even one second thinking about how the
| brain thinks), but we probably would not have had the pleasure
| to read your comment with this title.
| jsight wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one annoyed by the "it doesn't work
| the way _you_ think" phraseology. How dare they assume how I
| think? :)
|
| Its a pet peeve, I guess.
| darepublic wrote:
| The title of this post somewhat reminds me of a jira task
| title
| jraph wrote:
| You are speaking about the editorialized title "Mental
| Phenomena Don't Map Into the Brain as Expected", right?
| Well, yes, I would have titled a bug report exactly this
| way now that you say it.
|
| For reference, the original title is "The Brain Doesn't
| Think the Way You Think It Does", this is the one I reacted
| to.
| techbio wrote:
| The article begins by analogy to cartography, in which, the First
| Law of Geography[1] "everything is related to everything else,
| but near things are more related than distant things" applies to
| the space defined by the surface of the Earth. The brain is
| smaller than a pixel in a typical satellite photo but contains
| information to build the satellite, put it into orbit, and
| communicate with it via radio. Why would anyone believe that
| analogy should hold? Having read D'Amasio[2] ages ago, this
| appears to be looking for keys under a streetlamp simply because
| the light is better.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobler%27s_first_law_of_geog...
|
| [2]
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125777.The_Feeling_of...
| Giorgi wrote:
| Brain is interested how it thinks so made me click
| Invictus0 wrote:
| > Recent work has found, for instance, that two-thirds of the
| brain is involved in simple eye movements; meanwhile, half of the
| brain gets activated during respiration.
|
| Talk about misleading... obviously these two tasks alone don't
| account for 116% of the brain's power. The neocortex is all the
| same part of the brain--yes it can loosely be delineated into
| segments, but it is pretty pointless to say the whole brain is
| involved when really the neocortex is just distributing its
| inputs along its length in the process of searching for the
| appropriate cortical columns.
| philipov wrote:
| It's only misleading if you're stuck in a reductionist mindset
| where every piece only has one job and combines linearly
| together with other pieces.
| simonh wrote:
| You have made it misleading by taking it out of the context of
| the article which explains how that works.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'm confused. That's what the article is about. The quote you
| chose is 1/4 of the way in and then they spend the rest of the
| article explaining why those details are misleading. I don't
| understand what you're objecting to.
| coldtea wrote:
| Parent is objecting against patient reading
| peter303 wrote:
| Much of current cognitive science is neo-phrenology: geography =
| function. This article shows thats too simple.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| The brain is a piece of soggy bacon that lives in a shell of
| bone, has its own membrane that is like the gut lining, cleans
| itself by power-washing itself (and shorting itself out,
| essentially; REM sleep is basically the side effect of this
| process), depends on glucose for its special mitochondria[1], and
| your humanity is literally a thin layer of meat-paint on top of
| millions of years of evolution...
|
| ... that is doing scientific research on itself, and then reading
| it and understanding the strange symbols on the screen.
|
| [1]: All your organs have unique metabolic signatures, but they,
| generally, can all run on purely fatty acids; the brain requires
| about 30-40g of dietary glucose to run optimally, as fatty acids
| do not cross the BBB quickly enough.
| codeflo wrote:
| Something something diagonalization proof something something.
| tudorw wrote:
| how much?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Doesn't require dietary glucose, the liver will manufacture as
| needed from fats and proteins.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Upper limit of what is considered healthy gluconeogenesis is
| slightly short of what can be provided. Brain needs ~120g of
| glucose, you're about 30-40g short of that.
|
| 30-40g is almost nothing, could be, say, a cup of frozen
| berry mix, mixed right into 3/4th a cup of plain real greek
| yogurt, with some turmeric, ginger, and cinnamon mixed in.
| davikrr wrote:
| It can also subsist on top of ketone bodies - if fat
| breakdown is high enough due to a lack of glucose due to
| fasting or lack of other storage such as glycogen.
| kiba wrote:
| Also, it's possible to subsists and survive without food for
| quite a while.
| remir wrote:
| To me this is the most interesting thing. A bunch of organic
| matter evolved to the point where it is trying to understand
| itself. How crazy is that?
| techbio wrote:
| I know your ending question is a figure of speech, but since
| we are imagining it simultaneously, it's more or less by
| definition not crazy at all.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Poetry for nerds. (Thank you)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| If you were to look at how a computers' memory is organized, a
| rough, non-programmer idea of how it would map wouldn't be
| correct. Big visible things like windows or the start menu aren't
| put in a single place, etc.
|
| It seems like remarkable that people don't want to imagine there
| are the rough equivalent of many, many software layers between
| the level of the neuron and the level of "reason", "emotions",
| "self", "consciousness" and etc. I think this comes because the
| "sense of self" is a process that reflexively takes you as
| primary and indivisible. A framework that view this as generated
| by lower process violates this.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| You are exactly right. I'm a full time geek neurogeneticist. I
| find most neuroscience models of brain function too neat and
| simple. My pinned tweet at @robwilliamsiii is one idea that
| hackers and CS types may enjoy. In brief--where is the clock?
| Where are the many levels of the stack that you mention.
| moonchrome wrote:
| >Big visible things like windows or the start menu aren't put
| in a single place, etc.
|
| Sure they are - in fact it's rendered to linear memory blocks
| of pixels.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| OK, let's strain this analogy even more!
|
| In memory, sure, the image is in a block (although not
| really, it's composited (not composted) then shipped over a
| wire).
|
| But the functionality is basically everywhere. Similar in
| minds. We can see images "trip" localized circuits when they
| are recognized, but the comprehension and processing of the
| scene is muuuuuch more complicated.
|
| Similarly, where is the little 8bit block that handles a
| click on the start button, and why God Almighty is it so
| _far_ from the start button image!
| waterhouse wrote:
| > it's composted
|
| (This is an amusing idea, but I think "composited" was the
| word.)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Ha! Thank you
| acituan wrote:
| > I think this comes because the "sense of self" is a process
| that reflexively takes you as primary and indivisible
|
| Only if you reduce the sense of self to ego function, and a
| western one at that.
|
| Self is a _much_ more complicated process. And good models of
| it already acknowledge functional and content heterogeneity eg
| subpersonalities, embodiment, aspirations, narratives,
| personhood, boundary problems etc. Self exists because it
| solves these problems and doing so was adaptive.
|
| > It seems like remarkable that people don't want to imagine
| there are the rough equivalent of many, many software layers
| between the level of the neuron and the level of "reason",
| "emotions", "self", "consciousness" and etc
|
| This is a false dichotomy. We already know we have a grab bag
| of specialized accelerator "hardware", but also soft/firm-ware
| layers that glue things together. That's the whole point of the
| article, you can't encode autobiographical memories without
| hippocampus but that's not the only thing hippocampus does nor
| it is the only thing required to encode those memories.
|
| And people have already upped the ante on this; Cartesian
| reductionism of trapping "computation" upstairs is also wrong.
| Cognition requires an embodied and embedded agent. It is not
| even a mere "brain-thing".
| mabub24 wrote:
| Or, you know, the analogy of brain as a computer with
| computerlike memory management simply might not be 100% useful
| all the time.
|
| > people don't want to imagine there are the rough equivalent
| of many, many software layers between the level of the neuron
| and the level of "reason", "emotions", "self", "consciousness"
| and etc
|
| It's not that people don't want to imagine, it's that you don't
| _need_ to imagine that. You don 't need to force how the brain
| functions into the model of a modern computer, though it might
| simplify and be popular. It's often a helpful analogy/metaphor,
| and for people that know a lot about computers it often allows
| them to prognosticate and theorize using elaborate analogies
| built on top of more analogies, but it's equally helpful to not
| insist that the thing _must be_ the analogy.
|
| For instance, when I talk to a good friend who is a
| neuroscientist and active in the development of prosthetics
| with neural interfaces he is far more skeptical (healthily
| though) of the computational model than any person I speak to
| in software engineering or the tech industry more broadly.
| That's likely because the analogy and model can be built upon
| with further computer analogies, which people who work with
| computers love. If we were using an automotive model to
| describe how the brain functions, I'm sure we would have many
| automotive mechanics theorizing on the nature of cognition too.
| jmoss20 wrote:
| But brains do, in fact, compute things!
|
| There's no reason to think that they compute things the same
| way silicon "computers" do -- that they're arranged in a von
| Neumann architecture, or something. But it is true that they
| perform computation somehow, and therefore are subject to a
| similar set of constraints, and share similar goals
| (efficiency, persistence, etc) with modern silicon hardware.
| (Considering the differences is also insightful; ie our
| wetware is a much noisier environment than silicon, and
| likely requires a different approach to error correction.)
|
| This is a useful perspective, for reasons that GP pointed
| out. We know of many different physical arrangements that are
| conducive to computing: e.x. Turing machines, von Neumann
| machines, RNNs are all Turing complete (in principle), and
| all look very different. So we should question our
| assumptions about how the brain is organized. Why should we
| think that, say, sadness "lives" in some physical location in
| the brain? Does your email "live" somewhere on your computer?
| (In some sense yes, in some sense, no...).
|
| Is it not equally plausible that the brain implements a very
| large RNN? And if it does, should we be surprised that if we
| try to physically locate, say, "sadness", we might be
| grasping at straws? In the absence of experimental evidence
| (and even in the presence of it, if flawed assumptions are
| driving the sorts of experiments we conduct), both seem
| plausible to me.
|
| Which is just a long winded way to say, I think there is some
| value in questioning these assumptions. (Not blindly
| swallowing others, just pushing on why we have the ones we
| do.)
| [deleted]
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _It 's not that people don't want to imagine, it's that you
| don't need to imagine that._
|
| I seems like you're hijacking the discussion to your pet
| issue. My point isn't about how good in general the computer
| analogy is, it really isn't. You should consider that maps of
| brain function began quite a while ago, before the start of
| the 20th (though accelerated by WWI). Here, the analogy was
| the machine and the mapping of brain followed functional
| units in machines. And if you consider the point I make
| (which pretty much echos the article), it's really a counter-
| example. The multi-layer organization of software show a
| system doesn't _necessarily_ have to follow naive physical
| functional units, especially ones we naively perceive. That
| 's it, there's nothing here _forcing_ the computer analogy.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| I agree with joe!
|
| Neuroscientist love to reify a chunk of brain as
| responsible for function X. They have done this for 160
| years. Only Karl Lashley's work called "localization" into
| question but his work was swept aside in the Montcastle-
| Hubel-Wiesel era of big neuroscience.
|
| Now we do toy experiments using optogenetics of a single
| inbred strain of mouse and delude ourselves into thinking
| that we are achieving understanding of a highly complex
| system.
|
| I've worked in this field for 40 years and we are not even
| asking the right questions.
|
| It is a pity neuroscientists do not know more about analog
| computing. Can a neuroscientist understand an op amp?
| Probably not.
|
| To share the harsh light--can a CS expert in AI understand
| how to get to general AI? Probably not unless, like D.
| Hassabis, you have a solid background in neuroscience.
| Retric wrote:
| On one level that's a reasonable take it, on the other
| simply having enough data is a prerequisite to come up
| with the right questions. Astronomers collected literally
| centuries of data to build up ever more complex epicenter
| models before ellipsis became an clearly better fit to
| the data.
|
| IMO, neuroscience simply needs that foundational data and
| current theory is largely pointless.
| mabub24 wrote:
| I was agreeing with you. And we are arguing from the same
| side. My comment was more directed at how the meta-opinion
| in Hackernews generally struggles to step outside of the
| computational model, or into other possible theories of
| mind (or memory) developed by philosophers like
| Wittgenstein, Dennett, or Hacker; and, the result is
| usually forcing the computer analogy in ways that assumes a
| kind of blunt physicalism, like the discrete parts of a
| computer, and often nonsense, as you described. There is
| often disbelief expressed at the idea that you could use
| anything but software or computer analogies to describe how
| the brain functions, or the mind. The assumption is so
| strong that people do feel forced into the analogy simply
| because they also understand computers.
| brainmapper wrote:
| Please note that merely seeing some place in the brain activate
| in a functional MRI task does NOT necessarily mean that that
| location is either necessary, sufficient or even involved in
| representing information relevant to that task. Functional MRI
| amplifies small global signals related to arousal, and if arousal
| changes during a task then these arousal-related signals can
| propagate over much of the brain. And even something as simple as
| an eye movement can be correlated with global changes in arousal.
| (A similar problem occurs with attention.) Unfortunately many of
| the most common modeling and analysis methods methods used in
| fMRI have no way to distinguish these rather uninteresting
| arousal-related changes from those that are actually informative
| about task-specific processes. The bottom line is that whenever
| you read about any fMRI result, you should ask yourself whether
| that could be a mere artifact of changes in arousal (or
| attention), and if so you should find out what was done to
| address this potential confound.
| brainmapper wrote:
| Sorry I should have clarified this comment was addressed at the
| claims in the article that most of the brain is activated even
| for trivial tasks...
| DrNuke wrote:
| Mechanistic solutions are never meant to solve high level
| problems, but they very often make the fundamental bricks more
| advanced solutions will rely upon, at a later stage.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| True. But mechanistic "solutions" can also be used as a crutch
| that allows us to avoid asking the right hard questions. I
| started my career as an electrophysiologist studying a big
| chunk of the thalamus referred to as a visual information
| "relay"nucleus. In 40 years I have never seen anyone question
| this "relay" function seriously. I am reminded of the phrase
| from Princess Bride: "I don't think that word means what you
| think it means". "Relay" is a crutch to mask ignorance. No
| collection of complex circuitry--one million neurons in this
| case--is just a relay. It is also an important processor, but
| probably in a domain invisible to a neuroscientist recording
| from one or even 1000 neurons simultaneously.
|
| My vote is that the "relay" is actually a timebase corrector
| for noisy retinal input mosaics that have their own quirky
| dynamics and temporal noise.
| Borrible wrote:
| Mindboggling how brains have a blind spot for the thought of
| being an idea.
|
| Just as mindboggling as the mind's reluctance to think of itself
| as a brain.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Just as mindboggling as the mind's reluctance to think of
| itself as a brain.
|
| A bit of an understatement in my experience...very often, minds
| get rather emotionally agitated when encountering the idea that
| the reality they perceive is a representation of reality,
| implemented by a brain (as opposed to being reality itself).
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Very D. Hofstadter ;-)
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| Are the neurons outside of the head considered to be part of the
| brain?
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Is "brain" equated to "nervous system"?
| [deleted]
| dspillett wrote:
| Generally not. Which is why the nervous system of cephalopods
| seems so alien -- their processing is performed in a more
| distributed fashion.
|
| Sometimes the brain and spinal column are considered together
| in our case, as some of our survival reactions are governed by
| neurons in our spine, but that does not really match how
| cephalopods distribute their processing (something that is
| presumably necessary, or at least helpful/efficient, for
| controlling the flexibility of their limbs).
| tgbugs wrote:
| The top level partonomy for the nervous system is usually as
| follows. nervous system -> central
| nervous system -> brain -> spinal cord
| -> peripheral nervous system
| [deleted]
| EMM_386 wrote:
| If anyone is interested in the "deep" topics such as
| consciousness, materialism, quantum physics, religion, etc. I
| highly recommend the "Closer to Truth" series.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9StMQ79LtEvlrskzjoYbQ
|
| I recently stumbled across this and it has some fascinating
| episodes where he interviews many top people in each field.
| Michio Kaku, Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, religious leaders, etc
| etc.
| kens wrote:
| An interesting paper is "Could a neuroscientist understand a
| microprocessor". The idea is to apply neuroscience-style analysis
| to the 6502 processor running programs such as Space Invaders and
| see if you can find out anything interesting about the processor.
| They tried a bunch of different approaches which gave a bunch of
| data but essentially nothing useful about the processor's
| structure or organization. The point is that if these techniques
| are useless for figuring out something simple and structured like
| the 6502, they're unlikely to give useful information about the
| brain.
|
| https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
| (Click "download PDF", it's open access.)
| robg wrote:
| We've known for over thirty years, first based on lesion studies
| then neuroimaging. For instance, we saw that language didn't map
| to one region, but depended on how language was being used and
| then word meanings relying on sensory vs more abstract brain
| regions (e.g., cannon vs cannoli vs carve).
|
| Think of features with distributed representations, patterns of
| connectivity re-using bits in endless ways. Another
| oversimplification is that neurons can be only representing 1's
| and 0's. The true computational power is every state in-between
| and strength of connections between processing units.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| The original title might have been OK since the gist of the
| article is that what we call "mental phenomena" may not map at
| all. Just like somebody can't find "beauty" in an ANNs
| parameters.
| yboris wrote:
| My favorite writings on the topic of consciousness are by the
| philosopher Daniel Dennett with his books like "Consciousness
| Explained". He provide such fun thought experiments, and brings
| together so much science - it's a treat!
| lnjarroyo wrote:
| Never read that, I will look into it. One of the books I love
| is "The Mind's I" by Dennett and Hofstadter. Easily one of the
| best books I have ever read.
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