The coming neurotechnological revolution

[zeropoint]

I love science and my new interest is neuroscience. Who stated we use only ten percent of our brain and how did they get that conclusion? As I understand it our brain uses different areas to get and send info. Can we use more than ten percent? How do I get more than ten percent? How can I upgrade my I.Q. to gather more knowledge or is it futile?

pljames

 

Get more IQ? Don't bother. I have a very high IQ and belong to high IQ societies and forums. Believe me, it's not what it's cracked up to be. While I wouldn't go so far as to say "ignorance is bliss," I can say that, depending on the circumstances and your surroundings, a high IQ can be a lonely experience or it can be disappointing. My experience on some of the high IQ forums has been very frustrating. So many intelligent people and yet such lack of good scientific debate and discussion! A lot of what I encounter on some of the forums is simply shit-chat. I'd post a serious thread and it would be countered with some silly response or flippant reply and then a quick change of subject to some off-the-wall garbage.

 

What I find is that some of these people are high strung and of the artistic nature, flighty and emotional. Even the ones who are more science oriented seem to be handicapped by their IQs.

 

This is not an indictment of high IQ. There are some very gifted and capable people on some of the forums, but there is just too much weirdness to deal with for me. I'm still posting to them but infrequently. This forum seems much more promising to me.

 

Linda

[Bio-Hazard]

finish philosophy?

I was thinking having your brain connected to the internet...

and having the internet's problems come with it.

 

I just thought it'd be funny to get spam messages to your brain' date=' or having pop-up ads appear before your eyes, or even worse (and this is kinda creepy), having virus's / trojan's in your head. Imagine someone could know what your [i']thinking[/i]

 

I've thought about this.. Someone could know what I'm thinking at all times.. but if I don't know everything.. that means I won't know what happens when I mix these two random chemicals...

 

Boom! I kill both you and me. It has more good for them than me though. I like to take things to the extreme when they are a problem.. that way they can try and be prevented from reaching that state.

 

What I find is that some of these people are high strung and of the artistic nature' date=' flighty and emotional. Even the ones who are more science oriented seem to be handicapped by their IQs.

 

This is not an indictment of high IQ. There are some very gifted and capable people on some of the forums, but there is just too much weirdness to deal with for me. I'm still posting to them but infrequently. This forum seems much more promising to me.

 

Linda[/quote']

 

I'm tempted to leave this forum and go over to scienceforums.com.. but I like this layout more... i wish people from scienceforums.com came here instead.

[Cognition]

I would be very interested to see the final results in monkeys and Humans with such a "artificial hippocampus". For me it is very hard to believe that it will give the same results as the real hippocampus, unless every incoming connection from the rest of the brain is dealt with individually. If this is not the case (and the article gives me reason to doubt this), if will probably fail, because every single connection from (e.g.) the cortex represents a unique piece of knowledge

[CanadaAotS]

The brains extremely flexible however. It'll "reconnect" everything itself eventually I'd think...

[Cognition]

Ofcourse not. Then you would also expect that people with damage to their hippocampus would eventually recover by itself, and that doesn't happen. The damage is permanent

[Red_Ninja]

Hmm. A couple of major problems.

 

What's your procedure for converting HTML, XML, CSS, etc. into 'mentalese' ? Do these scientists know how to convert binary information i.e. information designed for a von neumann-esque serial machine, into information that can be processed by a highly subjective parallel machine such as the human brain ? How we know the converted code won't mean totally different things to different people ?

 

Further - if this is going to revolutionise the human species, where are the resources going to come from to halt our imminent decline ? Try giving the billion or so people without access to clean water a chip in their f***ing heads. I'm sure they'd be very grateful to know who scored the most home runs in 1963 while they're dying of dysentry.

 

Finally - a very very large proportion of the net contains erroneous information. I know Bascule had read some of the materials I've read - his comments on memes and references to Dennett indicate that he's read up on the nature of memes, and would therefore readily admit that the Internet contains a vast number of cultural memes. We know, however, that a meme does not just necessarily survive because it is beneficial, but rather because it is a good propagator in its own right. Look at all the negative but extremely influential factors of modern culture. I live in a Western country that like many has been taken over by an utterly bullshit culture of celebrity worship. A survey done in a neighbouring country came to the conclusion that 76% of females felt they were 'ugly' and over two thirds of those said they would have surgery if they could afford it. This is showing us that highly spreadable cultural memes are not necessarily of any benefit to the host organism (i.e. us). Integrating the Internet to our hippocamus would exacerbate this problem, not alleviate it.

 

There are bigger and more apparent problems to solve, end of. Beginning with the energy crisis that is sure to grip our society in the next ten years or so.

[bascule]

What's your procedure for converting HTML, XML, CSS, etc. into 'mentalese' ? Do these scientists know how to convert binary information i.e. information designed for a von neumann-esque serial machine, into information that can be processed by a highly subjective parallel machine such as the human brain ? How we know the converted code won't mean totally different things to different people ?

 

A classification algorithm (likely Bayesian) would be needed to decode the semantic meaning of phenomenological objects within the cortex after their structure is understood. Blue Brain is hard at work deciphering the operation of the neocortical column. Once this has been accomplished it's likely we'll have some knowledge of the structure of phenomenological objetcs within the cortex.

 

The classification algorithm would need to run on an individual for some time, reconstructing what it can of your own internal ontological structure in some other format where it can be mapped to OWL association data. OWL associations can then be reencoded into the phenomenological object format, matched with "hooks" onto your own existing ontological structure.

 

Further - if this is going to revolutionise the human species, where are the resources going to come from to halt our imminent decline ? Try giving the billion or so people without access to clean water a chip in their f***ing heads. I'm sure they'd be very grateful to know who scored the most home runs in 1963 while they're dying of dysentry.

 

Many of our problems with resource consumption are that we simply don't know what to do with waste that could be useful to others. Mathematician and storywriter Rudy Rucker envisions in his blog a world where ubiquitous information eliminates waste as virtually everything can be given to others.

 

Finally - a very very large proportion of the net contains erroneous information.

 

Information which does not jive with your existing ontological structure will be discarded. Either way it's injected directly into your cortex's association centers, either by your inferotemporal cortex or DNI. Phenomenological objects must evolve within your cortex to have impact on your personal ontology. Thus you won't be any more likely to believe "The sky is green" or "2 + 2 = 5" if injected into your cortex by DNI than if I were to tell it to you.

 

I know Bascule had read some of the materials I've read - his comments on memes and references to Dennett indicate that he's read up on the nature of memes, and would therefore readily admit that the Internet contains a vast number of cultural memes. We know, however, that a meme does not just necessarily survive because it is beneficial, but rather because it is a good propagator in its own right. Look at all the negative but extremely influential factors of modern culture. I live in a Western country that like many has been taken over by an utterly bullshit culture of celebrity worship. A survey done in a neighbouring country came to the conclusion that 76% of females felt they were 'ugly' and over two thirds of those said they would have surgery if they could afford it. This is showing us that highly spreadable cultural memes are not necessarily of any benefit to the host organism (i.e. us). Integrating the Internet to our hippocamus would exacerbate this problem, not alleviate it.

 

On the contrary, I think the percentage of our personal ontologies constructed from pathological memes (i.e. bullshit) is on the decline. Furthermore, despite the presence of bullshit, our sociotechnological (i.e. memetic) evolution is undoubtably quite progressive. Bullshit memes will continue to evolve, but their evolution isn't progressive, it accomplishes nothing and in the end will lose out to progressive memetic evolution.

 

Memes can't evolve unless communicated. Increasing the rate at which we can communicate merely increases the rate at which we evolve.

 

There are bigger and more apparent problems to solve, end of. Beginning with the energy crisis that is sure to grip our society in the next ten years or so.

 

Well, pretty soon we'll have to come to terms with the fact that humans are an inefficient platform for consciousness and we should move to a more distributed approach. See the same Rudy Rucker blog where he posits tons of nanorobots called "orphids" which provide a distributed network for quantum computation and storage on which artificial intelligence programs can run.

 

Singularity is the solution to mankind's upcoming resource woes.

[CanadaAotS]

Singularity? as in the technological singularity... from the law of accelerating returns right?

[Edtharan]

Get more IQ? Don't bother. I have a very high IQ and belong to high IQ societies and forums. Believe me, it's not what it's cracked up to be. While I wouldn't go so far as to say "ignorance is bliss," I can say that, depending on the circumstances and your surroundings, a high IQ can be a lonely experience or it can be disappointing.

I agree having a high IQ does not solve the basic problems of life (a recent test put my IQ around 140). As a child I had a lot of social problems because I easily out performed most other children in my year and was therefore picked on.

 

A lot of what I encounter on some of the forums is simply shit-chat. I'd post a serious thread and it would be countered with some silly response or flippant reply and then a quick change of subject to some off-the-wall garbage.

Having a high IQ does not make someine a nice person. I have know high IQ people that were real slimes and some other low IQ (below 90) that were amazing people (and the reverse too).

 

Having a high IQ does not change human nature.

 

What's your procedure for converting HTML, XML, CSS, etc. into 'mentalese' ? Do these scientists know how to convert binary information i.e. information designed for a von neumann-esque serial machine, into information that can be processed by a highly subjective parallel machine such as the human brain ? How we know the converted code won't mean totally different things to different people ?

I have heard of experiements at the Reding University in England where one of the professors had a chip implanted into his arm and converted this into a signal that could control a robotic arm. This was even done across the atlantic over the internet.

 

Another experiemtn with it was that someone else (his wife I think) had another chip implanted in her arm and the chips were linked together. Sensations one felt was felt by the other. So it does seem that human nural signals might be compatable.

 

Try giving the billion or so people without access to clean water a chip in their f***ing heads.

As infomation is being shared solutions to these problems and the plight of these peolple is becomeing more public. I think technology like the ability to link your mind directly to the memories of these people would be a big benifite to them, as then everyone would know what these p[eople were going through from their perspective. I think this would be an enormous aid for them infact.

 

Finally - a very very large proportion of the net contains erroneous information.

this is not realy an argument. We are presented with erronious infomeition every day of our lives. We have to examine this inflmation and slecet what we think is true. Not only that, our memories are very mallable. There has been experiemnt done where a persons memories were changes so that they had a memor of hugging Bug Bunny at Disney land (this is imposible as BB is a trademark of Waner Bros/Loony Tunes not Disney). Infact some of the people in the experiemnt had never been to Disney Land at all.

 

So that fact that the net contains erronious infomation is not anargument against having a chip that allow us to directly access that infomation.

 

Ok this sounds like a stupid idea... but if our memory's connect to the internet, wouldnt that open a scary new horizon for hackers?

Imagine having spam messages pop up in front of your eyes!!!

LOL.

 

Actually I think it wuold be that you would "remember" being told about this spam. The hipocamus does not directly connect to the visual cortex (afaik).