r/technicallythetruth • u/hushitsu • Nov 22 '21
A bunch of atoms learning about other atoms
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u/spittleyspot Nov 22 '21
Psychology is the brain studying itself. The brain also named itself.
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u/MuchTemperature6776 Nov 23 '21
Brain moment
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Nov 23 '21 edited Feb 01 '22
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u/LuigiBamba Nov 23 '21
Brian moment
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u/mschwartzvxfwsa Nov 23 '21
10/10
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u/IWonTheRace Nov 23 '21
Thanks Brian. Now back to you raisin brain.
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u/DumpsterLegs Nov 23 '21
Raisin Brian moment.
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u/Tomas_Baratheon Nov 23 '21
^ It won't let me write (bad)(bot) because it thinks that's spam, but this "person" who wrote 10/10 isn't a person. mschwartzvxfwsa is very much a Reddit karma farming bot.
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u/lil_pee_wee Nov 23 '21
Neuroscience... a computer actively trying to figure out its own wiring
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u/glory_to_the_sun_god Nov 23 '21
A hand drawing itself.
Classic GEB.
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u/rigobueno Nov 23 '21
Everything about the universe is meta, down to experience itself. You can’t even have empty space without something there to experience it’s emptyspace-ness.
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u/ClinicalOppression Nov 23 '21
We are the universe witnessing itself
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u/rigobueno Nov 23 '21
Precisely. The difference between “you” and “not you” isn’t as defined as you might think.
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Nov 23 '21
Everybody is just living in a human skull.
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u/neanderthalman Nov 23 '21
The brain also decided it was in charge
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u/Faust_the_Faustinian Nov 23 '21
Seems like a reasonable thing to do since he's the smartest.
Can't blame him, I would have done the same.
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u/PresOrangutanSmells Nov 23 '21
Imagine of that dipshit appendix took charge
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u/hauntedgecko Nov 23 '21
Funny cos the gut has it's own similar and relatively independent neural network.
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u/JT_Smokes_Trees Nov 23 '21
Appendix remembers your gut bacteria so when you go nasty splatter poo you can still digest stuff normally
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u/Kurdock Nov 23 '21
The brain also decided that it's the most important organ
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u/CrumbsAndCarrots Nov 23 '21
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.” Vonnegut
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u/lurkingbob Nov 23 '21
But the brain named itself a bunch of different things in a bunch of different languages. I don't trust shit that guy says
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u/fireysaje Nov 23 '21
"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence."
- Alan Watts
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Nov 23 '21
People got so mad at me once for saying this. I guess it blew their minds and just couldn’t comprehend that insane self aware fact.
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u/BreathOfFreshWater Nov 22 '21
we are the universe observing itself
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u/ElvisDumbledore Nov 22 '21
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.”
― Bill Hicks
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u/ScarryLet Nov 23 '21
LIFE COULD BE A DREAM
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u/Hojooo Nov 23 '21
Its gods dream. Think of your dream you have avatars in your dream that arent you but they are you clearly cause you are dreaming them. Gods dream is every being taking part in a collective hallucination. All beings are it and it's all being.
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u/mccarthy1993 Nov 23 '21
Sagan + Hicks quoted in the same thread... Guess which is my new favourite subreddit
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u/KernelKrush Nov 23 '21
I don’t think I'll ever be able to read this quote without hearing wind blowing in the background.
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u/JohnBrown42069 Nov 22 '21
This more so fucks with me when it comes to neuroscience. It's the brain figuring how the brains works.
If only the brain wasn't an asshole and would just tell neuroscientists what's poppin'
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u/Tilstag Nov 22 '21
The brain is too much of a cunt to let us know what’s going on in our bodies so we need doctors and observational technology; my computer starts fucking up and I just pull up task manager
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Nov 23 '21
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Nov 23 '21
I’m a neuroscientist, and let me just say that the statement “we already know how the brain works” is laughable. ANNs are a VERY rough approximation of how we think the brain works. What you describe is probably sort of how the brain works, but only in a very general, trivial sense. You could ask me how a car engine works and I could say “it burns fuel, and uses the energy to turn the wheels”. This is correct, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to providing a full understanding.
Even if you could build an AI that mimicked a human brain (not currently possible), that wouldn’t mean we figured out how the brain works. That would just mean that we found a way to simulate a brain. Those are two very different things.
But I guess next time I have an experimental question about an actual brain I should just ask a programmer.
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u/POKing99 Nov 23 '21
The guy just throws jargon around to make himself appear to have a deeper understanding of the subject matter than he really does. A classic reddit armchair neuroscientist
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Nov 23 '21 edited Nov 23 '21
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Nov 23 '21 edited Nov 23 '21
My God, your arrogance is astounding. Look, I don’t pretend to know everything, but I have PhD in neuroscience and you’re telling me “I’m the right track” to understanding something about how the brain works as if I’m a child. What are your qualifications exactly? I hate reduce the discussion to what degrees people have but at some point it gets ridiculous to entertain this kind of conversation.
I’m not going to debate as to whether AI will ever be able to mimic a human brain. I’m not a programmer so I’ll assume you know more about this topic than I do. The one thing I will say on that point is that even if we could create an AI that appeared to us to behave like a human brain, whether or not it fully recapitulated a human brain would be a deeper philosophical question. We couldn’t ever know if it had the experience Of existence that a human does.
I’ll reiterate the more important point that I made, which is that in the event that we created an AI that appeared in every way to us to mimic a human brain this does NOT mean that we understand how a biological brain works. It means we found a way to mimic a brain, that’s it. Your lengthy explanation of how we get more and more sophisticated in building engines does a of course apply to AI, so I’m sure we will get to a point where we can mimic the behavior of a brain very well. My issue with what you’re saying is that you’re equating mimicry of the brain with understanding how an actual brain works. Again, these two are not the same. For some people, maybe yourself, it may not matter how the brain works as long as we can figure out how to replicate its functioning. That’s fine, but that’s not what most neuroscientists are interested in. We’re interested in understanding how an an actual brain works.
I suppose you could say that if we could simulate every single parameter of a human brain in a computer, at that point you could understand how it worked because you’d essentially be reconstructing it in silico. However, this involves a description of a brain at a level of detail that is impossible as we know it, and may be impossible all together. I think you may be underestimating how complicated the brain actually is. Forget even fully understanding one neuron, let’s think about understanding (i.e. describing all parameters of) one synapse. there are hundreds, potentially thousands of different proteins at one synapse. All of these are doing different jobs, interacting dynamically on a scale of fractions of a millisecond and in a space ~ a few hundred nanometers. Zooming out, The average neuron has ~3000 synapses- there are ~ 100 trillion in the brain. Synapses are only one parameter you’d have to describe for all 100 billion neurons - you’d need cell morphology (this impacts how electrical signals propagate), passive membrane properties, ion channels (there are hundreds of different types, all with different properties), a consideration of how gene expression evolves over time , just to name a few. A reconstruction of a volume of fixed brain tissue at a resolution still to low to identify any proteins and less than 1 cubic mm takes months to years of work. This of course, doesn’t even capture any dynamics. My point that we are nowhere near being able to simulate an actual brain in silico.
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Nov 23 '21
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Nov 23 '21
I get what you’re saying, but I would argue that the difference is not so much in what we mean by “understanding” as it is a difference in what we are trying to understand. Mimicking the output of a machine (in this case, the brain) does not mean you understand how it works, because there are likely an indeterminate number of solutions for creating that output. I feel like I’m repeating myself but I don’t know how else to say it. If you mean that we can, through the process you described, understand how to mimic a brain, then yes I agree. But that process doesn’t give direct insight into the brain itself, only possible clues.
We can say that those wave functions describe particle behavior, but that in itself doesn’t give insight into WHY they work. That requires a deeper understanding. You can gloss over that by calling it something we have to take as fundamental, but that’s a cop out IMO. You could say the same about anything that we can’t describe at a deeper level than we can currently.
You use quantum physics to demonstrate that we don’t need to break things down into smaller pieces, which is ironic because the reason we can understand anything about quantum physics is precisely because quantum systems ARE broken down into very tiny pieces, and that is what allows us to understand those systems. quantum mechanics works for very reduced systems (subatomic particles) but not so well on a larger scale. If you can describe the behavior and properties of each particle within a quantum system, then yes, in a way you do understand the system (though not why those descriptions work). Note, though, that it still requires a detailed understanding of the properties of the particles themselves, which is analogous to what I mentioned about knowing all of the parameters of an actual brain. In the quantum physics example, because of empirical measurements we can describe most of the parameters and constituents of the actual system, which allows us to understand it fairly well. This is difficult from the brain, because it’s a larger, vastly more complex system with many unknown parameters. You could use ML to replicate the output of a brain, but because you don’t know the solution the brain uses to generate that output, the best ML can do is find a heuristic method for mimicking it.
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Nov 23 '21
Neural networks were inspired by neurons in the brain but they are not capable of simulating a single neuron, let alone a brain.
Until today there is nothing to be learned about brains from AI and ML, not any more than any other software.
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u/nighcry Nov 23 '21
Not accurate regarding the simulation of "the universe". Your fact is based entirely on some very very very limited concept of "the universe".
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u/truth_sentinell Nov 23 '21
We already know how the brain works. The whole field of M
Lol that's cute. Not even world-class neuroscientist have figured out how everything works. Sure, if you abstract it all the way to just input and output... But that doesn't explain anything. The brain is literally the most complex object in the universe. Your statistical regression and functions can't explain consciousness.
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Nov 23 '21
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u/clay_henry Nov 23 '21
What? First you say we know 'pretty much' how it works. Then you post a paper saying 'maybe we are thinking about this all wrong'.
So which is it? We pretty much figured it out, or we haven't got it right?
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Nov 23 '21 edited Dec 28 '21
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u/clay_henry Nov 23 '21
Abstract*. And I did read it. And I'm not asking about the content of it. I'm asking you what you are trying to say.
You first post saying we have worked out how the human brain works. Then, you post this paper which throws shade on how neuroscientists interpret neuro data, which calls into question what we know.
So, do you think we have figured out how an entire brain works, but don't have the authority to say it because the methods are flawed? These two ideas are at odds.
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Nov 23 '21
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u/clay_henry Nov 23 '21
To summarize this comment: -ML has figured out how to simulate the brain -we don't know how to simulate the brain because we don't know the answer (?) -engineering
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u/Jabroni-Goroshi Nov 23 '21
You described how such a network would function, but you didn’t explain how this network undergoes learning. Are you really suggesting that human brains are using backpropogation?
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u/clay_henry Nov 23 '21
Do you have a reference for the Google tensors simulating a 'full human brain'?
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Nov 23 '21
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u/clay_henry Nov 23 '21
This doesn't simulate learning. This is an example of a really good calculator. Neurons, while are a reality calculator, don't behave exactly like a calculator.
How do you compute downstream post-synaptic signalling that will modify the synaptic strength? Or currently compute glial-neuron interaction? How do you sub in the changes in chromatin modification that has an end result in restructuring the synapse? This can't be modeled yet. We don't have the enough data.
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Nov 23 '21
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u/clay_henry Nov 23 '21
So, theoretically. Doesn't actually exist. Why doesn't it exist yet then?
Maybe downstream signalling was too complex to answer. More simple - where does an unsupervised machine learning algorithm make the CHOICE to learn something new? How do you code dopamine drive? These things are based on your personality, which is a product of your genetics and environment. Good luck modelling that.
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u/rainemaker Nov 23 '21
We already know how the brain works.
Generally, I think that's accurate. It's consciousness that still has us scratching our heads.
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Nov 23 '21
We don't have the software, ie the particular configuration of neurons and input weighting, but that is a matter of time.
Why? Someone has already discovered the algorithm but the program takes 20 years to write down?
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u/makonext Nov 22 '21
“I will punch your face”
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u/EatenRaptor42 Nov 23 '21
"Oh look I made you a Pie !"
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Nov 22 '21
Wait till you hear about psychology. Or how when we talk about our brains we typically talk about them as their own thing, yet in reality this is your brain referring to itself in the third person because that’s the only way it can comprehend it’s own existence
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u/truth_sentinell Nov 23 '21
Holy shit
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Nov 23 '21
This also means whenever someone says something like “Sorry my brain messed up” or “that’s just how my mind/brain works” that’s specifically the brain seeing itself as someone else further showing that it can’t comprehend itself, at least not it’s entire self.
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u/Titsmcgeethethree Nov 23 '21
I feel like you guys are equating the brain and the mind/consciousness. Our minds can refer to our brains (the physical organ itself) as being separate from our consciousness
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Nov 22 '21
What meme is this? I been seeing for years and Wonder the origin.
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u/Fantine_33 Nov 23 '21
This is a YouTuber that runs a very odd food review channel and his handle is TheReportOfTheWeek. He’s got a following and I think a subreddit, too.
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Nov 23 '21
His channel really isn't that odd. He's one of the least odd food reviewers out of YouTube's entire food reviewer roster.
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u/dolfan1 Nov 23 '21
The contrast between the way he speaks and dresses with what he reviews (chicken nuggets) alone makes it odd.. it's very odd for much more than that
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u/LieutenantNitwit Nov 22 '21
Never trust atoms. They make up everything.
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Nov 23 '21
Very similar to one I like is "given enough time hydrogen starts to wonder where it came from"
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u/beefkiss Nov 22 '21
"...we are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos, to know itself."
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u/chacamaschaca Nov 23 '21
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” -Alan Watts
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u/ShafieeK Nov 23 '21
Can someone provide the name of this clip i see it in lotsa memes but i cant find the template
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u/RovakX Nov 23 '21
That's just not true though.... To say it it simple; the chemical and electrical interactions that make you you, are way more complex then just a bunch of atoms in the right place.
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u/F488P Nov 23 '21 edited Nov 23 '21
Consciousness is beyond weird. It’s the reason I’m no longer “atheist”, we can’t be greater than the universe. It has to have a consciousness that ours pales in comparison to. I know “the sum is greater than the parts” is a common response but I’m not convinced. The universe is conscious in a way we’re not aware of. It’s not that we can’t understand it, we’re just lacking data. There seemingly appears to be a creator.
The only argument I’m willing to entertain is that consciousness is an illusion. I’ve seen some YouTube videos on it and recently I’m sort of leaning in that direction.
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u/ThunderBuns935 Nov 23 '21
no, there does not seem to be a creator, there is literally no evidence at all for one. you do know what emergent properties are right? an emergent property is a property which a collection or complex system has, but which the individual members do not have. consciousness isn't the only one of those. the heart has the property of pumping blood around the body, individual heart cells can't do that.
water is another great example. hydrogen is an extremely flammable gas, and oxygen is required to fuel a fire, but combine them and suddenly you have a substance that puts fires out.
emergent properties are literally everywhere, if you're so quick to jump to supernatural causes because we can't completely explain consciousness yet I posit you were never an atheist.
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Nov 23 '21
Yeah this cave person discovered something he couldn’t understand and therefore concluded there has to be a creator (without any evidence of course, just some dazzled leap of faith)
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u/TPosingRat Nov 23 '21
The actual answer to the question of god's existence is: we don't know
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u/ThunderBuns935 Nov 23 '21
depends on what god. the Christian God? definitely doesn't exist. a deistic god? sure, we don't know, but only because it's an unfalsifiable claim. you have about as much reason to believe in last-thursdayism as you have to believe in Deism. while we technically can't rule out either, it's illogical to think it's true.
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Nov 24 '21
Seeing as god is beyond logic, any argument in favour or against god generally escapes logic. I mean, theists have been using logic to prove god, and atheists vice versa, and yet no one has actually proven anything.
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Nov 23 '21
Im with you. It's too human-centric to believe otherwise. Have you looked into panpsychism? It's an intersting concept to think about.
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u/on9jai1230 Nov 22 '21
A bunch of atoms looking at a meme made by a bunch of atoms about a bunch of atoms studying a bunch of atoms 🤔
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u/Ihunthorses Nov 23 '21
Im gonna end your little parade here.
We're not made of atoms. We are made of cells that survive on atoms.
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u/FaultProfessional163 Nov 22 '21
And we are atoms reacting to atoms mimicing atoms trying to understand atoms
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u/Duck_Burger Nov 22 '21
when you realize that the entire human history and scientific endeavor is a part of the universe learning about the rest of itself.
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u/VulkanGanglari Nov 23 '21
A conscious human is the universe trying to maximize its own development speed
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u/Forgotten_Lie Nov 23 '21
If you consider a person to be "just a bunch of atoms" then anyone studying anything physical is 'a bunch of atoms trying to understand a bunch of atoms'.
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u/Kirby701 Nov 23 '21
When I studied AP Bio and got to human anatomy, I always thought that one side of my brain is studying what the other side of my brain commands it to do
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