"mental" versus "physical"

>>8197803
Naw dog thoughts are magical

>>8197803
Universities have things called 'textbooks' that contain information about a variety of topics, such as neurophychology.

>>8197810
considering i stated the level of education, by saying i'd be too retarded for whitepapers, i think you could know that i have no reason to be found in any university, let alone their library.

>>8197815
Students are poor and thieves.
Students pirate text books.

>>8197815
watch youtube videos about the brain and neural networks you mongol

>>8197822
i was hoping for higher level information. to be exact, i might not understand terminology in whitepapers, but this does not mean that i can't comprehend what they stand for.

Wish I could help you. I like this board, but holy fuck there's a lot of assholes here.

>>8197803
>in short, i want to know if this really means that any thought we have is a real, touchable thing within our grey/white matter?

You can touch your brain, your neurons, your synapses, heck even the electrical signals going back and forth. As far as science goes, our thought processes are believed to be based on electromagnetic interactions and are therefore touchable.

>Could we someday posess the technology to read and write to a mind via electrical or chemical impulses?

given to perverse amount of complexity behind the brain and knowing the limits of physics at the molecular level, I would say any attempt to probe the brain in a way so that you can get a very clear picture of what exactly is happening inside would be nothing short of a lobotomy.

>Is there anything i should or could read about this, that is not tinfoil hat level retarded

everything that's not in a textbook, journal or written by an approved academic is tinfoil hat retarded, that goes for all fields of science.

This certainly is not an answer to your desire to educate yourself specifically about the subject.

However i encourage you to read some books by Sam Harris or listen to his podcasts. You will have to be selective as he covers a variety of subjects but he does have a degree in neuroscience and is knowledgeable on free will.

He is one of the few very conservative individuals i respect highly. Check him out.

>>8197842
I'm not from here, and i have never really lurked here either. the boards i roam are without a doubt worse than this place (/mu/, /g/, /a/,/trash/, and sometimes /co/) i'm happy with people like the one below you.

>>8197846
>You can touch your brain, your neurons, your synapses, heck even the electrical signals going back and forth. As far as science goes, our thought processes are believed to be based on electromagnetic interactions and are therefore touchable.
there's so much we don't know. is it possible that it is impossible for a thing to study and truly understand itself?
>nothing short of a lobotomy.
could this change within, say, 10 years?

>everything that's not in a textbook, journal or written by an approved academic is tinfoil hat retarded, that goes for all fields of science.

i think i'm just in denial about this. i know you're right though.

>>8197869
>there's so much we don't know. is it possible that it is impossible for a thing to study and truly understand itself?
This is stupid. Never say it again. The real difficulties to knowing exactly what's going on in the brain is that there are millions of neurons, each one of which can make up to 1000ish connections with other neurons, that splooge up to around 100 different neurotransmitters on each other in a bunch of feedback loops.

It's just a problem of mapping and observing. Right now we just don't have the technology to do this fully. We will in time though.

>>8197803
>I realised a few days ago that all the stuff we call psychological and mental, are nothing more than physical responses of the brain.

You should also realize that these "physical responses" are nothing more than biological and chemical reactions which are nothing more than physical reactions which is nothing more than a bunch of atoms moving around which is nothing more than subatomic physics.

Never go full retard reductionistic. The brain is a component of our body that is intimately INVOLVED in our behavior. But it is not that behavior. Brains don't think or feel. Whole humans do. You "see" the color yellow. Your brain does not see shit.

>Could we someday posess the technology to read and write to a mind via electrical or chemical impulses?

We could probably do small modifications but the brain is not a hard drive. You can't just upload math to your brain. You can't upload language to your brain. You could probably artifically thicken the neuronal connections in areas of the brain associated with these activities which would probably help with faster learning of these subjects. But the brain is not a read/write device.

Pick up a neuroscience textbook or popular book if you want to read about it.

>>8197900
sorry, there's also a lot that I don't know.

>>8197864
thanks, will do!

Thank you, /sci/, it's now bed time here in the netherlands, i bid you all farewell.

>>8197803
Yep. Terms like "psychological" and "physical" are just used because it's linguistical difficult to convey what you mean otherwise.

In actuality they're both no less mechanical than turning on a faucet and having water come out.

>>8197916
>Your brain does not see shit.
There's a rough physical copy of the visual field inside the brain. It can be imaged. This has been done.

>>8197934
Bullshit. It is not a "rough physical copy." It's basically looking for activation patterns in the brain that happen when you look at different shapes. Then, once you've seen enough of these activation patterns, you 'translate' the brain activity back into shapes. That's not the same thing as "rough physical copy."

No doubt you're going to have different brain activation patterns for different images and even different words. But we'll never be able to take a baby and stimulate it's brain and have it magically speaking language and solving equations. The brain does not work that way.

The brains of blind people and also those with brain lesions show how different parts of the brain can acquire new functions that traditionally would not be associated with those brain regions.

The brain is not a computer or a hard drive. It works on different principles.

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>>8197934

>>8197974
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. By your logic an image put through lossy compression, when decompressed, is not a "rough copy" of the original.

Yes, the information is stored, filtered, and represented differently. No, this doesn't change anything about having a saliency map roughly representing your surroundings.

>>8197803
Well we dont even know that the grey/withe matter is the same all brains. It can be that the color red in my head is located different than in yours. It is better to se the function of our psychological states. Like if we agree that we precive the same wave lenghts and both call them red, even tho under the skin we precive something different.

>>8198041
> not trusting cameras
weirdo, your optic nerve doesn't stretch much
Eye globe luxation is a medical emergency

>>8198041
Ya dun goofed.

>>8198085
I'm trying to say that digital (or analog) media are not like brains.

Media are static surfaces that can be magnetized precisely so that replay is essentially the same as the original. Media come to us as a blank slate that we can write anything on. The resulting written information can be read back anytime for an almost perfect copy of the original.

Brains are not static. They are interconnected and constantly active. Yes, you can probably 'read' brains with more and more precision to the point where we might eventually know what they're thinking or seeing. But 'writing' to brains is a different matter. Brains are far more dynamic than media. And despite the high potential storage capacity given the number or neuronal connections, no brain has come anywhere close to storing the same amount of data as media. Why is that? It's because brains work differently. Brains are a dynamic media with high adaptability and constant activity.

The output for media is your computer, DVD player, phone, etc. The output for brains is the person's body. Could we upload LeBron James's brain into someone else and expect them to play like LeBron? Probably not because they don't have the muscular strength for it.

And just whom are we going to use as cases for uploading LeBron's brain? If I put media on any device - an SSD, a HDD, a floppy - it'll come out the same. If I upload LeBron's brain into different people, including NBA players, I can't fathom why we would expect the same results.

There are some similarities between brains and storage media, don't get me wrong. But they don't extend as far as many think they do.

>>8198127
Oh. I didn't realize this was in the context of mind "uploading", or brain transfers. A concept I am very thoroughly sick of hearing about, especially when made relative to neural net magic.

Yeah, we more or less agree. Body is made of parts, but it's also one intertwined whole. Just as the existence of a tree doesn't strip the nature of a forest and its ecology relative to this individual tree. People have a tendency to desire there to be a clear divide between hardware and software when it comes to the brain, but it just ain't so.

Though I'd be apt to say the brain is at least in some sense, digital. Not fully digital, nor truly analog, but there are some similarities. Looking into how pyramidal cells encode their outputs makes this quite apparent.

>>8198138
My apologies for my tone. I can't track who I'm talking to which makes it difficult to distinguish the oldfags from the summerfags.

The partially digital nature of the brain is intriguing. It's one of those areas where it could start at the animal level and move up from there. We could have dogs doing tricks that they were never trained to do just by fiddling with their brains.

Given the advances in cloning and stem cells we might have cyborg animals that show amazing behavior without ever being taught. And then eventually humans, although the ethical and practical implications of doing so on a large scale will be more serious than we can fathom today...

>>8198127

Genuinely curious: are you in a field of brain research? Because most of these thoughts come off as someone who really doesn't know what they are talking about. Almost all of your sentences are gibberish.

>If I upload LeBron's brain into different people, including NBA players, I can't fathom why we would expect the same results.

How does one upload a brain? Imagining this was even possible in principle, is it in practice? Let's assume it was, why would you think uploading a brain would change the way someone's legs work? You're somehow astonished by the fact that people have different bodies, and my body can't do all the things a freak athletes can. If you could somehow upload Lebron's brain into my body, he'd be horribly clumsy and eventually his cognitive maps would re-align to his current body. But, more importantly, what does any of this have to do with the brain not being like media?

And, from an earlier post:
>No doubt you're going to have different brain activation patterns for different images and even different words. But we'll never be able to take a baby and stimulate it's brain and have it magically speaking language and solving equations.

Wow. It's hard for me to express how unrelated those two sentences are.

>>8198127
>>8198593

As one extra note, for a good (albeit hefty) read as to why the brain is quite like media (specifically, computers), read Computation and Cognition by Pylyshyn.

>>8197803
You know, there are signalling neurons spread out all over cells across the entire nervous system, not just the brain, right?