chapotraphouse

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it, and when I politely raised the issue in subsequent email communications, they still had nothing to offer months later. They saw the problem. They didn’t dismiss the challenge as trivial. But they couldn’t offer an alternative. In other words, the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them.

I mean, protip, if you ask people to discard all of their language for discussing a subject they're not going to be able to discuss the subject. This isn't a gotcha. We interact with the world through symbol and metaphors. Computers are the symbolic language with which we discuss the mostly incomprehensible function of about a hundred billion weird little cells squirting chemicals and electricity around.

Yeah I'm not going to finish this but it just sounds like god of the gaps contrarianness. We have a symbolic language for discussing a complex phenomena that doesn't really reflect the symbols we use to discuss it. We don't know how memory encoding and retrieval works. The author doesn't either, and it really just sounds like they're peeved that other people don't treat memory as an irreducibly complex mystery never to be solved.

Something they could have talked about - Our memories change over time because, afaik, the process of recalling a memory uses the same mechanics as the process of creating a memory. What I'm told is we're experiencing the event we're remembering again, and because we're basically doing a live performance in our head the act of remembering can also change the memory. It's not a hard drive, there's no ones and zeroes in there. It's a complex, messy biological process that arose under the influence of evolution, aka totally bonkers bs. But there is information in there. People remember strings of numbers, names, locations, literal computer code. We don't know for sure how it's encoded, retrieved, manipulated, "loaded in to ram", but we know it's there. As mentioned, people with some training and recall enormous amounts of information verbatim. There are, contrary to the dollar experiment, people who can reproduce images with high detail and accuracy after one brief viewing. There's all kinds of weird eiditic memory and outliers.

From what I understand most people are moving towards a system model - Memories aren't encoded in a cell, or as a pattern of chemicals, it's a complex process that involves a whole lot of shit and can't be discrete observed by looking at an isolated piece of the brain. YOu need to know what the system is doing. To deliberately poke fun at the author - It's like trying to read the binary of a fragmented hard drive, it's not going to make any sense. You've got to load it in to memory so the index that knows where all the pieces of the files are stored on the disk so it can assemble them in to something useful. Your file isn't "stored" anywhere on the disk. Binary is stored on the disk. A program is needed to take that binary and turn it in to readable information. 'We're never going to be able to upload a brain" is just whiney contrarian nonesense, it's god of the gaps. We don't know how it works now so we'll never know how it works. So we need to produce a 1:1 scan of the whole body and all it's processes? So what, maybe we'll have tech to do that some day. maybe we'll, you know, skip the whole "upload" thing and figure out how to hook a brain in to a computer interface directly, or integrate the meat with the metal. It's so unimaginative to just throw your hands up and say "it's too complicated! digital intelligence is impossible!" Like come on, we know you can run an intelligence on a few pounds of electrified grease. That's a known, unquestionable thing. The machine exists, it's sitting in each of our skulls, and every year we're getting better and better at understanding and controlling it. There's no reason to categorically reject the idea that we'll some day be able to copy it, or alter it such a way that it can be copied. It doesn't violate any laws of physics, it doesn't require goofy exists only on paper exotic particles. it's just electrified meat.

Also, if bozo could please explain how trained oral historians and poets can recall thousands of stanzas of poetry verbatim with few or no errors I'd love to hear that, because it raises some questions about the dollar bill "experiment".