[HN Gopher] Neural Noise Shows the Uncertainty of Our Memories
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Neural Noise Shows the Uncertainty of Our Memories
Author : alberto_ol
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-01-19 07:27 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| [deleted]
| aeternum wrote:
| It would be much better if these articles started by describing
| the experiments themselves and experimental results.
|
| Instead the article and even recent 'scientific' papers now start
| with the outlandish conjectures by the author based on some
| strained potential interpretation of the evidence.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| This is a typical problem with Quanta. I'm not quite sure who
| their target audience is, but I doubt they get anything beyond
| the vaguest idea of what is done here. And if you know more,
| you don't need to be told about Thomas Bayes etc. and you could
| probably quickly realize that the research is an
| overinterpreted incremental thing dressed up as a breakthrough
| to advance careers and back-scratch some famous academics who
| then go on to pose as the face of, and to take credit for an
| entire subfield/line of research.
|
| Laypeople would gain much more from learning about solid,
| settled and stable pieces of knowledge about various scientific
| aspects. Instead, we get these weird frankenstein stories
| mixing basic concepts and cutting edge research, where in the
| end readers go aways with a smug sense of satisfaction of
| keeping up with new scientific developments while not really
| understanding what it really was about.
|
| Instead, listening to a well-structured didactic lecture or
| reading a textbook has much better "return on investment", but
| it's less satisfying than the glossy magazine (or its online
| equivalent).
| darkerside wrote:
| Starting with why makes a lot of sense before you start putting
| technical details in front of a lay audience
| aeternum wrote:
| The problem is the why is complete conjecture.
|
| No one knows how human memories are stored, it's ridiculous
| to assert that quantum noise plays a role when we can't even
| tell whether it's the brain's connectome that stores memories
| vs. molecules like talin.
| cmehdy wrote:
| > Yet if computing probabilities is such an integral part of how
| we perceive and think about the world, why have humans gained a
| reputation for being bad at probability?
|
| Maybe we are able to grasp probabilities at the most fundamental
| parts of our physiology, but layers and layers of cognition on
| top of it add estimators with noise (all our guesses around the
| world and ourselves) which pretty much hide entirely the
| probabilistic foundation (perhaps due to limits in cognition &
| memory degradation). Guessing that something is "a red car
| turning left" is a hell of a lot more complicated than guessing
| whether a singular line is at a 45-degree angle. For the latter
| maybe we can tap into neuronal activity almost 1-to-1, for the
| former you have to add estimators around red, car, turning, left,
| and language assumptions.
| gfody wrote:
| FOKs (feeling-of-knowing states like when you know it when you
| hear it or you know it but you can't get it off the tip of your
| tongue) are supposedly the perception of "certainty" encoded in
| cannabinoids and our brains have more cannabinoid receptors than
| any other kind (stuggling to find a source for this atm, I read
| it somewhere on the internet)
| swayvil wrote:
| Certainty seems to be an entirely artificial state. Born of a
| combination of _insulation from reality_ and _assertion of
| arbitrary distinctions_.
|
| Truth becomes a mere videogame artifact, like loot-chests and
| magic swords.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Is it true that you wrote this comment or am I playing a video-
| game?
| swayvil wrote:
| Well, it depends.
| [deleted]
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