Although the physical features gradually change from one face into another, the researchers showed that subjects looking at the images tend to "suddenly flip" from seeing Marilyn to seeing Maggie, explains team member Jon Driver.
What other possibility was there? Since our circuitry is made to identify the faces, it's not exactly trained to say "60% that and 40% this."
In related news, subjects were found to "suddenly flip" between saying No and Yes when asked "Did you have enough of that?"
Great! so can you confirm for us that endogenous electrical (& other) fields are hardly studied beyond specifics like embryonic organ development and healing, and some particular emission at the skin?
I guess I'm going to disappoint you, but here's my view of that. I would agree that endogenous electrical fields are not studied all that much. I don't know what other fields are there, to tell you the truth. I'm a firm believer in that the fundamental fields (gravitational, electro-weak, and nuclear aka strong) are the only forms of matter (i.e. energy) in our universe. Maybe my physics PhD is to blame.
I am not saying that other fields are 100% impossible, but I don't believe they exist. To change that belief, I would have to be faced with the hard-core experimental data indicating otherwise, and it's just not there.
I know nothing about special particulat emissions at the skin. Does not mean the do not exist, but I'll believe it when I see it (or some one else does in a reproducible way). There could be all sorts of EM fields, as well as thermal gradients, surrounding humans skin, but that perfectly fits into the physics we know, and so far there's no need to add another field to explain reproducible phenomena, is there?
As for the intercellular wireless systems, what would be the need for them if the cells are already connected through bloodstream, hormones, neural signals, etc.? After all, the cells are not that mobile to have a need for a wireless laptop when they can happily use existing sockets in the wall:-)
So if sentience is an emergent property of connecting a critical mass of evaluating units...
This is still a big if:-), so until that is answered (preferrably, experimentally demonstrated) the rest is a good set of very interesting speculations, isn't it?
how can a neuron tell that the brain has thoughts except in how it is influenced by those it is connected to?
That would depend on what the "thought" is. My guess is that the neuron neither knows nor cares about the thoughs in general. Each neuron is summing up the inputs and producing the output, and that's it.
It does seem that sentience is a property of a large mass of untis, however there's a huge leap from that statement to the statement that connecting the critical mass of those whould do the trick. I'm not sure about that leap, but I don't have anything better to offer either:-)
Re:This is all cool, but...
on
Mind Over Machine
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Theorists suggested that when you replicate the behavior of a neuron and let them talk with 9,999,999,999 copies of that virtual entity, then we'd instantly see a computer that can think and learn just like a human. Is a neuron that complex? What is the hold up? I always suspected that this idea was a massive oversimplication of the issue at hand.
The neuron is not that complex, it is believed to be mostly understood. The research is still being done on "how does this drug affects that channel in neuronal membrane" and stuff like this, but the basic functionality of the neuron has been known for some decades now.
What's complex is the 10^10 portion:-) As to what's the hold-up: try connecting that many pieces. So far, the number of people on earth is not that large. One can speculate that that we've already connected about 6^9 elements in the form of Earth's population. Just like the neurons, each is connected to as much as 200 of others (no neuron is directly connected to all of others in the brain:-)
If so, the "theorists" should see the human population of this planet as that very computer. It is way too dumb as a whole, if you ask me:-) It definitely exhibits no signs of thinking and learning.
How does the monkey decide that it needs to get water and what exactly "decide" means on neuronal level is still a mystery, by and large. If we're not considering that question, however, the next question is "how does it actually get water once it decided to do so."
The process of getting is, the motor control portion specifically, involves activating the muscles in a certain fashion, taking into account a lot of things: how far are you from the water source, what's it's orientation, how heavy your limbs are, are your limbs stuck in honey or slipping on the mud, etc:-)
Plus the water source can be moving, and you may want to correct your action in the process. So, it's not the same task whenever you're thirsty.
This is all cool, but...
on
Mind Over Machine
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This does not answer how brain works at all:-) As a motor control neuroscientist by trade, I can tell that finding out what the brain actually doing has little to do with these neat things.
This is not to say that it's not important -- all kinds of prosthetic devices can be made to help people with disabled limbs or other parts of the motor control system -- so it's a great benefit to those people. The important thing is that these devices are still controlled by the human brain, and nobody has a good idea how.
The fact is, you can probably hook up whatever device to whatever portion of the brain (e.g. an artificial arm to you toenail brain area) and after some practice the subject will learn now to move it. So when they say "we don't see the brain as a mysterious organ anymore" they are telling you a bold-face lie.
The mystery would be demonstrated to be solved when we can build a computer with massively parallel and slow (up to 1kHz) elements that can match human performance in tasks like tracking, reaching, as well as learning those tasks.
So far, all the beatiful performance of the cool gadgets is accomplished by super-fast feedback and super-fast computing elements. Our neurons are ways slower, but they do much better. Therefore, the whole essense and mystery of the brain is how to connect 10^10 shitty elements into a great learnable machine. Algorythms and parallelism are still the mystery of the brain, even if the popular science magazines claim otherwise:-)
After Kermit 95, there probably will be Kermit 98, followed by Kermit NT, Kermit ME, Kermit 2000, and finally Kermit XP.
But somehow, I can't imagine Kermit Longhorn as a species...:-)
Seriously, it definitely was (is?) a great program, especially when communicating between less common platforms. It saved my day more than once when I needed to transfer files between the VAX and Amiga, both quite ancient, and without ethernet hardware on Amiga. Many thanks to the creators!
I would be so bold as to disagree here. It is definitely easier to talk about the program when both student and teacher can see the source, not when the tiny portion of it is displayed on the monitor.
Incidentally, what is this "D. Knuth's way" of which you speak?
There's a formal way of proving the program does what you think it does, much like proving a math theorem. Every loop has an invariant associated with it (e.g. i-th row of the matrix is normalized to 1 on the main diagonal). Going through the loop is then the simple act of plugging the end value of the loop counter into invariant expression. If statements are considered all the way through, much like different assumptions in math proofs. Goto statements are outlawed. Just a formal approach, nothing more, nothing less.
The famous book by Donald Knuth, "The Art of Computer Programming," has a lot of this.
You would have killed my grade. Our school library is too small to carry that much on any specific topic unless it is one that is explicitly studied in several courses. The internet is an astounding tool.
So it is, I wholeheartedly agree. If I were your teacher, I would open an access for you as I knew you're working on your project and not just watching cartoons. My point is, you should not have it in school unless you need it (presumption of guilt:-). Right now it's the other way around -- you loose your access only (if at all) when you're proven to abuse it heavily.
My position on this is that the students don't have their rights as such, like the right to have Internet access. Kids are there to learn, and it is up to the teacher to decide what they need to learn. Think again about the TVs: you may have learned a lot from it, but as a whole it's mostly entertaintment and nobody would make it a learning tool, at least not for everyone.
This is a bit like complaining about having to be able to perform basic maths operations before being allowed to use a calculator.
So, do you think that method resulted in your programming skills being better, or worse ?
I am not complaining -- on the contrary, I am proud to have been in school like that! Of course, my skills are better since I have learned about the essense before the ocean of insignificant details.
First off, I'd love to have a kind of computer 450 of which cost just short of 1M$ -- that would be almost 2K$/computer. Not exactly a budget cut type of purchase, if you ask me:-)
Second, they would not be having the technical problems they do now, had they not gone with that infamous OS from Redmond, plus they would save much on the OS/support costs.
But this is all secondary. The most important fallacy in blaming the computers for dumbing the classrooms is in that the teachers don't have a clue what the computers are for. Where I went to school, the games were prohibited. You had do write you program using pen and paper. Then you had to prove (in D. Knuth's way) to the teacher that it works. Only after that you were allowed to type your code in and try compiling it.
As for the web, IM, chatrooms, etc, one has to be blind not to recognize this as entertaintment which is not the purpose of the school. I would not have internet connections from classroom computers. Local network is fine, but one would have to prove than (s)he really needs Internet access for that project before the access is granted.
It's like bringing TVs to school. While they can definitely be a source of important information, hardly anyone would fancy buying TVs for the school to close information divide:-) How is the (internet and games enabled) computer different in that regard?
His points about hypertext (mostly in the last third of the essay) make RTFA worthwhile, though.
Actually, I disliked this part the most, for the following reason: saying that every word in hypertext is linked to every other word and therefore looses its unique value is the same as to say that every neuron in the brain is connected to every other neuron and then the brain is meaningless.
It could, in principle, be linked to anything, but this does not mean it is linked. The sad thing is, you can't talk about these issues and neglect the details, because all the devil is in details.
Slashdot Mirror
Although the physical features gradually change from one face into another, the researchers showed that subjects looking at the images tend to "suddenly flip" from seeing Marilyn to seeing Maggie, explains team member Jon Driver.
What other possibility was there? Since our circuitry is made to identify the faces, it's not exactly trained to say "60% that and 40% this."
In related news, subjects were found to "suddenly flip" between saying No and Yes when asked "Did you have enough of that?"
And more here.
I know :-)
Great! so can you confirm for us that endogenous electrical (& other) fields are hardly studied beyond specifics like embryonic organ development and healing, and some particular emission at the skin?
I guess I'm going to disappoint you, but here's my view of that. I would agree that endogenous electrical fields are not studied all that much. I don't know what other fields are there, to tell you the truth. I'm a firm believer in that the fundamental fields (gravitational, electro-weak, and nuclear aka strong) are the only forms of matter (i.e. energy) in our universe. Maybe my physics PhD is to blame.
I am not saying that other fields are 100% impossible, but I don't believe they exist. To change that belief, I would have to be faced with the hard-core experimental data indicating otherwise, and it's just not there.
I know nothing about special particulat emissions at the skin. Does not mean the do not exist, but I'll believe it when I see it (or some one else does in a reproducible way). There could be all sorts of EM fields, as well as thermal gradients, surrounding humans skin, but that perfectly fits into the physics we know, and so far there's no need to add another field to explain reproducible phenomena, is there?
As for the intercellular wireless systems, what would be the need for them if the cells are already connected through bloodstream, hormones, neural signals, etc.? After all, the cells are not that mobile to have a need for a wireless laptop when they can happily use existing sockets in the wall :-)
So if sentience is an emergent property of connecting a critical mass of evaluating units...
This is still a big if :-), so until that is answered (preferrably, experimentally demonstrated) the rest is a good set of very interesting speculations, isn't it?
how can a neuron tell that the brain has thoughts except in how it is influenced by those it is connected to?
That would depend on what the "thought" is. My guess is that the neuron neither knows nor cares about the thoughs in general. Each neuron is summing up the inputs and producing the output, and that's it.
It does seem that sentience is a property of a large mass of untis, however there's a huge leap from that statement to the statement that connecting the critical mass of those whould do the trick. I'm not sure about that leap, but I don't have anything better to offer either :-)
Theorists suggested that when you replicate the behavior of a neuron and let them talk with 9,999,999,999 copies of that virtual entity, then we'd instantly see a computer that can think and learn just like a human. Is a neuron that complex? What is the hold up? I always suspected that this idea was a massive oversimplication of the issue at hand.
The neuron is not that complex, it is believed to be mostly understood. The research is still being done on "how does this drug affects that channel in neuronal membrane" and stuff like this, but the basic functionality of the neuron has been known for some decades now.
What's complex is the 10^10 portion :-) As to what's the hold-up: try connecting that many pieces. So far, the number of people on earth is not that large. One can speculate that that we've already connected about 6^9 elements in the form of Earth's population. Just like the neurons, each is connected to as much as 200 of others (no neuron is directly connected to all of others in the brain :-)
If so, the "theorists" should see the human population of this planet as that very computer. It is way too dumb as a whole, if you ask me :-) It definitely exhibits no signs of thinking and learning.
How does the monkey decide that it needs to get water and what exactly "decide" means on neuronal level is still a mystery, by and large. If we're not considering that question, however, the next question is "how does it actually get water once it decided to do so."
:-)
The process of getting is, the motor control portion specifically, involves activating the muscles in a certain fashion, taking into account a lot of things: how far are you from the water source, what's it's orientation, how heavy your limbs are, are your limbs stuck in honey or slipping on the mud, etc
Plus the water source can be moving, and you may want to correct your action in the process. So, it's not the same task whenever you're thirsty.
This does not answer how brain works at all :-) As a motor control neuroscientist by trade, I can tell that finding out what the brain actually doing has little to do with these neat things.
:-)
This is not to say that it's not important -- all kinds of prosthetic devices can be made to help people with disabled limbs or other parts of the motor control system -- so it's a great benefit to those people. The important thing is that these devices are still controlled by the human brain, and nobody has a good idea how.
The fact is, you can probably hook up whatever device to whatever portion of the brain (e.g. an artificial arm to you toenail brain area) and after some practice the subject will learn now to move it. So when they say "we don't see the brain as a mysterious organ anymore" they are telling you a bold-face lie.
The mystery would be demonstrated to be solved when we can build a computer with massively parallel and slow (up to 1kHz) elements that can match human performance in tasks like tracking, reaching, as well as learning those tasks.
So far, all the beatiful performance of the cool gadgets is accomplished by super-fast feedback and super-fast computing elements. Our neurons are ways slower, but they do much better. Therefore, the whole essense and mystery of the brain is how to connect 10^10 shitty elements into a great learnable machine. Algorythms and parallelism are still the mystery of the brain, even if the popular science magazines claim otherwise
After Kermit 95, there probably will be Kermit 98, followed by Kermit NT, Kermit ME, Kermit 2000, and finally Kermit XP.
But somehow, I can't imagine Kermit Longhorn as a species... :-)
Seriously, it definitely was (is?) a great program, especially when communicating between less common platforms. It saved my day more than once when I needed to transfer files between the VAX and Amiga, both quite ancient, and without ethernet hardware on Amiga. Many thanks to the creators!
Alex
Now that, is retarded.
I would be so bold as to disagree here. It is definitely easier to talk about the program when both student and teacher can see the source, not when the tiny portion of it is displayed on the monitor.
Incidentally, what is this "D. Knuth's way" of which you speak?
There's a formal way of proving the program does what you think it does, much like proving a math theorem. Every loop has an invariant associated with it (e.g. i-th row of the matrix is normalized to 1 on the main diagonal). Going through the loop is then the simple act of plugging the end value of the loop counter into invariant expression. If statements are considered all the way through, much like different assumptions in math proofs. Goto statements are outlawed. Just a formal approach, nothing more, nothing less.
The famous book by Donald Knuth, "The Art of Computer Programming," has a lot of this.
You would have killed my grade. Our school library is too small to carry that much on any specific topic unless it is one that is explicitly studied in several courses. The internet is an astounding tool.
So it is, I wholeheartedly agree. If I were your teacher, I would open an access for you as I knew you're working on your project and not just watching cartoons. My point is, you should not have it in school unless you need it (presumption of guilt :-). Right now it's the other way around -- you loose your access only (if at all) when you're proven to abuse it heavily.
My position on this is that the students don't have their rights as such, like the right to have Internet access. Kids are there to learn, and it is up to the teacher to decide what they need to learn. Think again about the TVs: you may have learned a lot from it, but as a whole it's mostly entertaintment and nobody would make it a learning tool, at least not for everyone.
Alex
This is a bit like complaining about having to be able to perform basic maths operations before being allowed to use a calculator.
So, do you think that method resulted in your programming skills being better, or worse ?
I am not complaining -- on the contrary, I am proud to have been in school like that! Of course, my skills are better since I have learned about the essense before the ocean of insignificant details.
Alex
I think you are saying this is a sign of bad teaching.
Not at all -- I am proud to have been in school like that! I am surprised it read the way you understood it :-)
Alex
First off, I'd love to have a kind of computer 450 of which cost just short of 1M$ -- that would be almost 2K$/computer. Not exactly a budget cut type of purchase, if you ask me :-)
Second, they would not be having the technical problems they do now, had they not gone with that infamous OS from Redmond, plus they would save much on the OS/support costs.
But this is all secondary. The most important fallacy in blaming the computers for dumbing the classrooms is in that the teachers don't have a clue what the computers are for. Where I went to school, the games were prohibited. You had do write you program using pen and paper. Then you had to prove (in D. Knuth's way) to the teacher that it works. Only after that you were allowed to type your code in and try compiling it.
As for the web, IM, chatrooms, etc, one has to be blind not to recognize this as entertaintment which is not the purpose of the school. I would not have internet connections from classroom computers. Local network is fine, but one would have to prove than (s)he really needs Internet access for that project before the access is granted.
It's like bringing TVs to school. While they can definitely be a source of important information, hardly anyone would fancy buying TVs for the school to close information divide :-) How is the (internet and games enabled) computer different in that regard?
Alex
I know it's their fault and not Sigma's. I just can't see what's in it (not distributing the sources) for them, the violators?
Alex
of hiding the source? Apparently they have to comply with the GPL and provide the source for their binaries upon demand.
But what is the point for them in not providing it? Anybody can get it from Sigma anyway... Good conspiracy theories, anyone?
Actually, I disliked this part the most, for the following reason: saying that every word in hypertext is linked to every other word and therefore looses its unique value is the same as to say that every neuron in the brain is connected to every other neuron and then the brain is meaningless.
It could, in principle, be linked to anything, but this does not mean it is linked. The sad thing is, you can't talk about these issues and neglect the details, because all the devil is in details.
Alex