Credibillity of Psychics. Your take on it...

Discussion in 'Pseudoscience Archive' started by H-kon, Jul 7, 1999.

  1. H-kon Registered Senior Member

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    312
    Zygos.

    I would still like to hear of your experiences

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    "All i say is keep looking".
     
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  3. Aloysius Registered Senior Member

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    H-kon,

    Sure, you're talking about the efficiency of an operating system in analogy to the efficiency of the brain. However, it's not clear that the brain has such a thing as an operating system. It looks to be a (somewhat) hierarchical, self-organised web of computational elements. There is certainly no "program", since it is not a von Neumann machine.

    So what do you think of the conjecture in my previous post?
     
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  5. Boris Senior Member Registered Senior Member

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    Aww, all right. If you guys insist, we'll digress from the forum's topic a bit.

    1) All brain pathways are utilized. In fact, a biochemical mechanism exists which prunes away pathways which are not utilized, or come in conflict with the pathways in use. For your information, a newborn has something like twice the number of neurons, and many more connections, than an adult. However, all those connections are jumbled and conflict with each other -- that's why early in life humans don't show much cognitive capability despite their brain size. Gradually, through pruning and rearranging neurons and connections, the brain cleans up its architecture and optimizes itself to the specific environment within which it operates. In this light, every last connection in your brain is in use; if it wasn't it would have severed itself.

    2) Although the brain isn't a von Neumann machine in a classical sense, it can be viewed as a Turing machine. The commonality that brain shares with computers is not architectural; it lies in the fact that in the brain, the program and data are represented in the same way within the same hardware, just like they are in the computers' memories. The brain is a bit more than just a classical computer, however, because in the brain it's not just the program or data changing, but the hardware itself is constantly changing, and is itself a representation of both the program and the data.

    3) My statement concerning brain utilization comes from reviewing many lesion studies which show that damage to practically any area of the brain results in impairment of some set of cognitive capacities. The statement is also supported by funcional brain imaging, which measures brain activity changes as subjects perform tasks. Thanks to functional imaging, post-mortem chemical pathway tracing, lesion studies,and even single-cell recording, we have now mapped a variety of functions and behavior modules to the cortex, to the extent that we now know that not even a square millimeter of the cortex goes unused.

    4) The basic cognitive capacities of humans seem to have remained unchanged for the last few millennia. What makes the average modern human more intelligent than an average Bronze Age human is the amount of education. Because the brain exhibits a great deal of plasticity early in life, the volume and richness of information and experiences to which the brain is exposed in the early years has a hefty impact on that brain's cognitive capacities further down the line. Given that, it is reasonable to assume that a modern human retains more of the infantile brain pathways due to the greater deluge of more varied experiences early in life. Thus, we can be said to be utilizing our cognitive architectures more efficiently now than humans did a few millennia ago. However, we are indeed fully using all aspects of our current cognitive capacity at one time or another.

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  7. zygos Registered Senior Member

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    hi,

    Ok first off there is not a limitless amount of connections, but there are lots of them none the less. Now I will pretend today that I agree with you boris, and instead of challenging you, I will ask you (Isn't that better?). Now Boris the psyic abilities have been measured, and pretty much been shown to exist in some people (encluding Einestein),and to be pretty accurate (87%) explain how in your mind this is possible.

    "asking the ego is a dangerous thing"
    Yours zygos


    [This message has been edited by zygos (edited July 18, 1999).]
     
  8. Mid12am Registered Senior Member

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    How exactally was it measured? Is it like the "testing for Jedi" in starwars. Or more of a you walk around with a divinging rod helmet on for a week and monitor the results.



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    (Midnight@golden.net)
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    (http://home.golden.net/~midnight/)
     
  9. H-kon Registered Senior Member

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    LOL

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    Aloysius:

    There is no way of overclocking your brain i agree with that.. but it is like using your brain in a more efficient way so that you can do more, remember more.. somekind of tweaking it if you understand me. Not having special powers, but just waking up the sleeping tissue we all are wearing.


    As for Boris:

    I am sorry to say this Boris, but either are you living in a box, or I am too open minded. You take science far too seriously. Not long ago. Lobotomi was a good thing to do, it just takes a while before someone says *whoops* and stops doing that. I myself believe in science, but i have a moderated releationship to it. If I was to believe that science was allways right. I would have learned that 2 years ago, Coffee was good for me, 1 year ago, coffee was not healthy, and now it is healthy again.. Science doesnt have a "true face" but then again, i guess thats why it is science huh?

    I suggest that we REALLY use around 5-10% of our mind total. If we were to use 100% of it, we would not be able to store what we learn other than in the short term memory, if you dont suggest that our brain expands that is?

    I have to congratulate you Boris being the first guy i know that use 100% of the mind. Then you will admit that you know everything. that you speak all the languages of the world, that you really know everything about everything. that whenever i have a question about something, you would know the answer to it.

    Today there are computers being made that is about the size of a grain of salt. The information that can be stored onto it are unimaginable, and are 100 million times faster than the computer that you and i are typing on. Our mind can store a bit more than that wouldnt you think? Or are you suggesting that a brain is inferior to that technology?

    The fact is that no one knows how much information our mind can store. We know somewhat where the different things are stored in our mind, but we have no idea WHATSOEVER what the capabillities of our mind is, how it works, and why it works as it does.. If we did, then hey.. Why hast Artificial intelligence advanced that much? Why arent there biological machines out there?
    We know nothing about a brain at all!!!

    A tad off topic, but i had to say this.

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    "All i say is keep looking".

    [This message has been edited by H-kon (edited July 19, 1999).]
     
  10. Boris Senior Member Registered Senior Member

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    Zygos:

    I would be very interested in seeing the actual scientific paper(s) from which you are quoting your figures. To my knowledge, no such unequivocal demonstrations had ever occurred.

    H-kon:

    I'm afraid that neuroscience is a bit farther advanced than the science of nutrition.

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    Using 100% of the brain does not mean being the smartest person ever, or knowing everything. Just as you use 100% of your energy intake from food, you use 100% of your white/gray matter. However, you can use the food energy for growing fat, or you can use it for growing muscle. Similarly, you can use the brain for constructing the next GUT, or you can just waste it in idle cycles watching TV.

    Brain capacity is not infinite, and is not even all that large, contrary to popular misconceptions. The fundamental storage unit in the brain is the synaptic junction. Here's a back-of-the-envelope estimate of their numbers: ~100,000,000,000 neurons x ~30,000 synapses/neuron / 2 (since a synapse are shared between two neurons) = ~1,500,000,000,000,000 -- or on the order of 1 quadrillion synapses -- per adult human brain. In computer terms, this roughly corresponds to 1 petabyte within a factor of 10 or so. While at brain's tiny scales and high energy efficiencies such storage is beyond current technology, massive archives are even now being constructed that are capable of carrying over a petabyte of information. However, the brain's storage mechanism is not binary, nor digital. Rather it's analog and is further capable of being nonlinearly modulated in a variety of modes. Storage is accomplished not like a binary recording on tape or disk, but like a holographic recording on a film -- every synapse contributes to storage of multiple data items to various degrees. Hence, the overall information capacity of the brain is quite a bit more than a petabyte, but should not be much more than something on the order of exobytes (10^24 bits.)

    You are quite right; this is something far beyond any present computer technology. However, one should note that not all of that information-carrying capacity is used for knowledge; the vast majority of it is gobbled up by behaviors, emotions, skills, locations, objects, qualities, etc. Also, large amounts of this information are not really data, but programs -- synaptic connections that form networks for everything from analysis of sensory signals to smooth interpolation of movement, to inducing sleep/wake cycles, to governing hunger and satiety. So I would expect that the final useful (for abstract knowledge) information-carrying capacity of the brain is well under an exobyte, and quite possibly on the order of merely petabytes or even less.

    Theoretical maximums are one thing, though -- the reality is typically a bit less enthralling. As I mentioned before, the brain is highly interconnected. As such, it is bound by necessity to spend a lot of its resources simply buffering different processing areas from mutual interference. Also, due to physiological limitations memory can't just be stored anywhere; typically it is stored right next to the particular modalities that are involved in that memory's generation. Thus, memories of sounds reside in the auditory corteci, visual memories are located in the supplementary visual corteci, more abstract memories are located near associative and speech processing centers. Then there are metabolic limitations tied to the fact that learning is tiresome. Therefore, you are forced to expend greater amounts of time and energy whenever you need to absorb large quantities of information. Couple this with the constant degradation of memory due to overwriting with new memories and pure noise, and you face a fundamental limit on the amount of knowledge that can be retained by any human individual, no matter how gifted. Granted, some of us have better memories than others due to the fact that no two brains are alike -- but there exists a limit beyond which no human will ever reach, save through genetic or cybernetic enhancement.

    All of which amounts to the fact that it is physically impossible for any human being to ever know everything that is known to the human civilization in general, because the present knowledge of our civilization must have already exceeded the exobyte.

    Concerning discussions of the brain's 'speed', one must remember that 'megahertz' is not everything. Architecture ultimately matters a whole lot more than mere clock frequency. While the fastest CPUs of today are reaching into the gigahertz range, the human brain operates at a measly 50 hertz! Nevertheless, even an insect brain leaves today's supercomputers in the dust. How could that be?

    Well, for one we have the tremendous storage and retrieval capacity built right into the CPU. But far more importantly, brains are massively parallel machines. Even an insect's brain contains on the order of hundreds of thousands of neurons, with the total number of connections numbering in billions. All of those connections and all of the neurons are computing simultaneously, not one at a time, and therein lies the trick. A thousand little ants will build an anthill much faster than a single large, fast, and powerful ant. A million straws will hold the weight that snaps a steel cable. Not even the most powerful computer of today could simulate such a 'simple' thing as an insect brain in real time. That's not only because the processing and storage requirements are mind-boggling, but the behavior of neurons and neurotransmitters is computationally expensive to model, putting the overall computational demands beyond even the systems that are currently capable of simulating nuclear blasts.

    When we talk about improved utilization of our neural architecture, we don't mean increasing the frequency of operation (it's a physiological limit dictated by our body temperatures, our brain sizes and the related thickness of our axons, and diffusion rates of ions across our cellular membranes, among other things). We mean a more efficient neural network formed through extensive training. Just as you can build up your muscles with exercise, you can build up the sophistication of your brain. However, just as it becomes more difficult to pump iron with old age, the brain also quickly looses the bulk of its flexibility -- only it does so much faster, and is quite rigid by the time puberty is over. That is why it is so vital to intensively educate and stimulate children -- because the quality of their early education will strongly impact their performance for the rest of their lives. Now, I hope by now it's becoming clearer what I mean by 100% brain utilization. We utilize 100% of what we have -- which is quite different from what we could theoretically or potentially have, if our genetics and early education were optimized to the limit -- and definitely quite different from what is not theoretically possible even for a human brain.

    <hr>

    I hope this discussion somewhat clears up the reasons why artificial intelligence has not advanced all that much. The simple truth is that our present technology is simply not yet adequate to successfully compete with the natural design. Give it another century, and you'll see artificial animals (perhaps even artificial humans) roaming the solar system.

    I hope it is also quite clear that we understand a great deal more about the brain than we do about coffee

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    The pity of it is, that neuroscience is still viewed as too advanced, and its basics are not included in the regular general education curricula. Thus there's a lot of ignorance out there with respect to the current knowledge about the brain. But I hope you keep asking -- so I could keep answering, and hopefully we could all learn something. (Anybody want to start up a separate thread on mind/brain?)

    Oh, H-kon:

    For your information, I am on my way to becoming a neuroscientist. So I think it's rather necessary for me to believe at least in the basic tenets of my future profession, wouldn't you agree?

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    I would be the last to proclaim that science is always right. However, you have to distinguish between two basic branches of science: theoretical and applied. Whereas applied science concerns itself with conducting experiments and testing theories, theoretical science merely builds theory. While the individual experiments can give incorrect or inconclusive results (as in the case of your coffee), when many hundreds or even thousands of different experiments are staged to test a certain phenomenon, a reliable picture inevitably emerges. Typically, only once that happens, theorists go to work and try to explain the observed pattern.

    Thus, theories are never wrong -- at least not with respect to the fundamental patterns that they were designed to explain. However, theories can be incomplete -- and end up predicting behavior that is not observed, or failing to explain newly-observed behavior. The general statements I made about the brain are basic knowledge among the medical and biological establishments for at least half a century; they are not result of theory, but rather of redundant experiment. And since theories are expected to converge toward the true answer, I'd say that so far the 'psychic' phenomena are not being viewed in a favourable light -- they do not correllate with any experiment or theory up to now; they do not even have basic cause-and-effect hypotheses behind them. That is why I am so interested in examining Zygos' sources for claims that psychic phenomena have been established with 83% certainty. If any such demonstration had indeed occurred and is reproducible, then the current theories would have to change. Until that point, however, the mystical phenomena are being consigned to the same pile of drek as the alchemists' claim of turning lead into gold.

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    I am; therefore I think.

    [This message has been edited by Boris (edited July 19, 1999).]
     
  11. god Registered Senior Member

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    Boris

    that was quite the long read , but Sounds as if you don't think humans will expand their brain size . Wouldn't more info introduced earlier in life expand size ? And would't the larger brain be repeated with each generation? If not how did we arrive at our current brain size

    keep the information coming appreciate the lessons!
     
  12. Aloysius Registered Senior Member

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    H-kon and Boris:

    You both seem to have taken my piece of spontaneous whimsy about overclocking the brain, and made it into a discussion point. It wasn't intended to be a serious proposal!

    Particularly, my "conjecture" was to increase the richness of semantic content in the information flow across the synapse.

    In terms of information theory, this would be equivalent to increasing the number of bits per message, all else being constant. In communciations theory terms, this analogises to increased bandwidth. The Broadband Brain. You heard it here first

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    I've been a member of the Neural Network Society since its inception in the 80s (I'm member number 400-something of ...what?...50,000 now?) so I go back a ways on this. I have never, however, worked professionally in the field, being a lowly electronics engineer (aka lapsed physicist).
    I get the journal every month, but, Silicon Valley being what it is, currently I'm 6 months behind in my rwading of them!

    I have at times been very excited by these neural network engineering attempts to "model cognition". I like the simplicity of Carver Mead's approach ("let the device physics do the talking"). He's just come out with a super new neural camera called the Foveon; check it out!

    I also like the fact that it took Stephen Grossberg many years to educate people about his Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART); one can find genuine complexity in the simplest architectures. As Boris points out, architecture is everything (including, I hazard, boosting the bandwidth, as I conjecture above). With the right architecture, a simple little neural circuit is capable of Principal Component Analysis! (extraction of eigenvectors). I find this fascinating.
     
  13. H-kon Registered Senior Member

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    312
    Boris:

    Quite a long post, but you have quite many errors which i am going to address shortly.



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    "All i say is keep looking".
     
  14. zygos Registered Senior Member

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    hi,

    Well first off Boris, the 83% is an average of many attempts, but unfortunitly I cannot say the exact source (it was on TLC I think) and as for my other information, I get it directly, through a channel.. And of course most people are skeptics of channelers (including at times myself), but often what I get is what is being got by someone else around the globe. And I guess like any belief it can't really be proven through documentation, but I personly I know its true though experience (I.E. when someone talks about what another channeler in saying, and I got in a month earlier). And I guess my only other proof is that as a rule I don't read what other "psys" are saying.

    "I'm a skeptic too!"
    Yours zygos
     
  15. Xeno Registered Senior Member

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    Lots of Input here.
    I'm a skeptic of UFOscience and I have
    quite a bit of information to back myself
    up.
    I used to be a believer, but not anymore.
    Well, I sure straightened MYself up
    two years ago.

    As for psychic activity - It can all
    be explained scientifically, not
    by some goobedy gobly crap that you
    find in religion or tabloid magazines.

    I'm not writing much now cause I have
    other things to do now.

    -Dan
     
  16. Boris Senior Member Registered Senior Member

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    God:

    As I said, brain architecture can be optimized through better nurturing early in life. Alternatively, one could tinker with genetics, or in quite a few decades, perhaps design cybernetic enhancements.

    The main problem with actually increasing <u>brain size</u> is that the human head is already hazardously large and presents grave threat during birth. We have evolved flexible skull plates that enable a baby's head to actually deform as it passes through the birth canal, but even such deformation has its limits. To evolve yet larger brains, we'd have to tinker with our genome, and either make the women's birth canals wider, or enable human embryos to continue embryological development past birth -- similar to, for example, Kangaroo embryos. Either way, we are talking about significant change here, and I don't believe it will happen any time soon.

    Aloysius:

    Synapses are merely points of contact between cells; the actual information is transmitted along axons in the form of voltage potential waves. I'm sure you are aware of that; my point is that to increase 'bandwidth', we would have to increase the information-carrying capacity of the axon. I don't see how this could be easily done, other than speeding up ion pumps and making the axon wider to, respectively, enable closer spacing of spikes, and to increase signal propagation speed to something above 20 m/s. Both of these modifications are bad ideas, because increasing axon diameter will dramatically increase brain size and also signal travel distance, and making the ion pumps faster would likely make them more energy-hungry, which could lead to a need for vastly expanded and enriched circulation system, which would again balloon the brain and put additional extreme demands on the rest of the body. If you have any other ideas, I'd be fascinated to hear them!

    H-kon:

    I'm waiting for your expose.

    Zygos:

    That's what I thought.

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    I am; therefore I think.
     
  17. Aloysius Registered Senior Member

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    Boris:

    Like you, I don't think physical changes are very practical, and the repercussions on the entire human body have to be paid for...somehow.

    Therefore, when I say "semantically richer" signalling, I mean that the *meaning* per spike (an abstract measure, but at least discussable) increases.

    Are you familiar with Lempel-Ziv data compression? (all the "zip" programs use a variant of it). The basic idea is that a dictionary exists either at the encoder, or within the message itself, or at the decoder, or some combination thereof. Possessing such a "shortcut dictionary" allows the sender to send references to larger blocks than single letters. Abstractly, one would send a line instead of the five characters "s-t-i-c-k".

    There are numerous ways to compress data: vector quantisation, wavelets, fractals, Fourier-based approaches (like JPEG, H.263 and MPEG), etc. In the communications domain, we have also many different ways to squeeze higher bandwidth down narrow pipes (like telephone wires - QAM, WDM, etc.).

    All of these approaches produce the equivalent of a richer semantic for the message, because it has been condensed in some way or other. It's in this spirit that I meant a more "efficient" brain.
     
  18. H-kon Registered Senior Member

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    Boris:

    I am going to do this short.. I have a master headache today, but i will give you a full reply, either on this forum, or by E-mail..
    ----------------------------
    I am very surprised Boris since you are becoming a neuroscientist that you dont even know that if we had used 100% of our food intake, we would not have intestants to process the food.. Why do you think you are going to the bathroom? Simple flaw Boris...
    I really hope that you do not believe that?


    Second.. How do you get the data that you are suggesting? You are mixing neuroscience with quantmechanics. Neuroscience is as you may know a very new study. You pull random numbers from the sky, and try to create something to touch afterwards. Your abstract theories and hypothesis are not valid simply because that no scientist on this planet can look me straight in the eye and say that they know how the brain works. Unless you are the first that is?

    You cannont prove anything! You say. " It should not be.. I would expect ..again.. your opinions and theories

    I hope that you can provide me/us with some facts, and i will do the same thing.
    This has been a short reply due to my migraine, but i had to answer just a little so that you would not think that i would retreat on this subject.

    So get of your high horse Boris, and provide me/us with some factual studies and numbers, and i will do the same.

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    "All i say is keep looking".
     
  19. Boris Senior Member Registered Senior Member

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    Aloysius:

    Actually, the brain already compresses data on many levels. For example, the retinas filter out much of the visual information; most of the information that V1 gets from the retinas is related to edges. Neurons in V1 are known to have Gabor wavelet-like receptive fields, and it has even been shown that artificial neural networks automatically learn Gabor representations when they are forced to optimally encode such things as location of the object within an image, for example. The auditory cortex gets input from the cochlea in the form of roughly a Fourier decomposition of the sound signal. It has been demonstrated that artificial neural nets do something very similar to PCA when forced to encode images within a narrow set of neurons. You can think of the eigenvector/eigenvalue representations that are formed as a sort of Hoffmann compression on vector sets. Our senses are indeed highly evolved and thus quite efficient; there's little reason to suspect that our brains are any less optimized. Actually, if such a thing as backpropagation learning is even approximated in the brain, it will automatically tend toward the most compact encoding schemes possible, especially if resources are limited. Now granted, if the resources are overabundant, at least artificial neural nets tend to get lazy and settle on the first satisfactory encoding that works. However, I suspect that with the brain's crowded schedule and rigid physiological data I/O specs, there is not much flexibility when it comes to freedom of representation formats. But supposing that the brain is not able to optimize its encoding in 100% of the cases -- how do you propose we help it do that?

    H-kon:

    When I mentioned food, I was talking about utilization of the energy we get from digesting food, not about all energy present in food (most of which we cannot extract)! But the intestinal tract would be there in any case, since it is used precisely to extract energy. What were you talking about?

    The numbers I cited are not random at all. The number of neurons in adult human brain has indeed been measured to be around 100 billion. Axonal arborization of various neuron types ranges from 100,000 to 5,000 connections, making around 30,000 on average across all neuron types (weighted average by abundance of each neuron type in the brain). Granted, my final numbers concerning total information-carrying capacity are guesses -- but they are educated guesses based on real data, and I believe are within at most factor of 100 of the truth. I went through the simple derivation for you; if you disagree with any step in my reasoning, let's discuss it -- you might even set me straight if I missed something!

    We don't yet know how the brain works as a whole. However, we have pretty good ideas about how certain sections of the brain work, for example primary and secondary visual corteci, auditory nuclei, certain thalamic pathways, hippocampus, colliculi and many others. We certainly have an extremely good idea when it comes to the brain's anatomy and its cellular structures and mechanisms.

    My condolences on the migraine...

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    I am; therefore I think.
     
  20. god Registered Senior Member

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    Boris

    Correct me if I'm wrong , but I read that humans have the largest brain . If thats true it would be true that size = intelligence. it would also reason that nature has gotten the most that it can out of brain architecture.it does not take a great number of cells to increase the memory capacity ( I think ) so we are not talking of great increases of size within successive generations.
    I know infant birth weights are on the rise , is there any studies showing the same for head/brain size?
     
  21. Boris Senior Member Registered Senior Member

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    It's <u>relative</u> brain size. What that means is, you weigh the brain, and you weigh the body without the brain; then you divide the brain weight by body weight -- and get the percentage of body weight devoted to the brain. Humans have the largest brain-to-body ratio, but <u>not</u> the largest brain (I believe the whales have the largest brains).

    Birth weights are on the rise obviously because of better nutrition and less exertion for mothers. The same reasons why the human race on average is constantly growin taller. But as far as I know, the brain-to-body weight proportion has not changed in humans (I have not seen any results showing that).

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    I am; therefore I think.
     
  22. Aloysius Registered Senior Member

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    Good post as usual Boris. Just some random responses:

    1. I recall the Gabor paper from Linsker, and the PCA papers from Sanger and Foldiak, and the cochlea stuff from Mead.
    2. I'd say backprop was physiologically unlikely, since it uses a global representation of state (memory), whereas the brain appears to process much more in a nearest-neighbour kind of style.
    3. I think you mean Huffman, not Hoffmann.

    So, you ask how one proposes to improve the encoding? Well - I don't know!

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    Chances are, it's already in some sort of local efficiency maximum, and the nearest better one lies aways away. To get there from here probably requires some major architectural lurches...this way lies major mutation!

    Perhaps in vitro gestation may lead the way to genetic freedom on brain size. There is then no birth canal to restrict cranial volume.
     
  23. Boris Senior Member Registered Senior Member

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    1,052
    Aloysius:

    Yeah, I mean Huffman. (What did Dustin have to do with it? Man....) You can tell, I'm terrible with names.

    Interesting idea about artificial gestation. But why stop there? Might as well engineer entirely new artificial brains to begin with. Or what the heck, while we are at it, create entirely new artificial life from ground up using deliberately optimized technologies and mass-produced replaceable parts... Who knows, perhaps that indeed is the future -- the next epoch of evolution, a switch over from natural selection to artificial creation. The ultimate irony, heh?

    There's an interesting philosophical sidenote to all this... If you are willing to resort to artificial gestation combined with genetic alteration, or even outright construction of artificial life, you forever doom humanity (or whatever it transforms into) toward a technological subsistence. The ultimate dilemma is this: do we want to increasingly depend on our external knowledge and resources, or is a more self-contained approach preferable?

    (I have this unexplainable feeling we are weering off further and further away from this forum's topic.

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    )

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