Queue on 24/9/2016 at 02:47
Quote Posted by hedonicflux~~
Hahaha. I'm going to use the blog to advance the human discourse and apply my ideas to activism. What the world needs now is the appearance of magic. The power elites have no power at all. Real power is in the mind, in the form of earthshattering beauty and profundity. The elites fear the real world. They barricade themselves from it because they dread the world so much that they're determined to have us kill each other off while they hide in their multi-millions dollar bunkers utilizing technology to shield themselves from climate disaster. The so called "powerful" will see what real power is soon enough, and they will be terrified.
I'm about to start a campaign to subvert the social order using the proliferation of ideas that will plant seeds of deeper thought in people's minds. I'll be printing out bulk orders of multiple postcards with messages and post them around the city.
Please, for the sake of humanity, sterilize yourself so as to not infect the gene pool with your mediocrity.
hedonicflux~~ on 24/9/2016 at 03:10
I have and have never had any intention of having kids. I am a stark antinatalist.
Queue on 24/9/2016 at 03:23
If people didn't reproduce there would be no one around to subscribe to your drivel activism.
How's that for an existential quandary, Schopenhauer?
hedonicflux~~ on 24/9/2016 at 04:16
There would be no need.
Mr.Duck on 24/9/2016 at 08:09
This thread is the Rapture.
Let us all ascend.
Vivian on 24/9/2016 at 09:26
You made me listen to echoes for the first time in years. I'd forgotten how much like LCD Soundsytem they sound like.
Vivian on 24/9/2016 at 09:28
Stark Antinatalist is coincidentally the name of my coldwave revival band.
faetal on 24/9/2016 at 10:01
Quote Posted by Vivian
Auxiliary seems wrong - neural stuff is really expensive to make and run. It wouldn't be there unless it did something important. You reckon it has any role in consciousness? Or is it just running the gut?
I don't think there's a neat term for it because it's not yet clear what it is. Some neuroscientists refer to the spinal column as the second brain simply because it performs sufficiently complex functions without the necessary involvement of the brain. Given that human brain size is more or less capped due to the relationship between head size and female pelvis size being at such a strained point that human babies are essentially born partially developed (fontanelle, inability to do anything at all for themselves for the first few months), I'd say that outsourcing to a different tissue mass is a great use of resources if it's possible and functional. I'm generally excited to find out what they turn up, but it being neuroscience, I'm guessing it will take a lot of time and be confounded by a tonne of shitty quick-win fMRI studies to make sexy images for New Scientist etc...
faetal on 24/9/2016 at 10:12
Let's not forget too that the best explanation for consciousness so far is as an emergent property arising from the synchronised interaction between so many different feedback and response suites.
If the gut neurology is complex enough in how it interacts with the rest of the body (don't forget that consciousness doesn't necessarily reside in the brain, you are your limbs and organs etc...), then I'd easily believe that it formed a part of consciousness. Though in the end, it all depends on what it is doing rather than just how complex it it is.
demagogue on 24/9/2016 at 11:29
Motherfuckers I had shit to do today & you want to talk about cns? I can't exactly leave it.
The core of cns, the "being awake & aware" part is midbrain, really ancient stuff, and SubJeff is our resident expert on that, at least the biology, being an anaesthesiologist, although he has wacko views on it. But granted some parts are legit weird, like nonlocality, distant activity appears to be binded, and modality.
Uh, the brain not only can't retain or process infinite data, but the big lesson from the book I just read (Paul Glimcher, Foundations of Neuroecon) is that basically every sense modality tosses out the raw feed right at the start, irretrievably, and constructs perceps in relative terms. I.e. there's apparently no true absolute brightness (or hotness, sweetness, loudness, etc), but as a delta from a baseline, with an exponential curve (eg, roughly "double than before" feels about equal). It does that because it exponentially cuts down the file size of the percepts by orders of magnitude (so Glimcher was arguing).
As for infinite creativity or generativity, formal linguists like that argument because the formal models let them add clauses to a sentence forever, and they want to say they're still grammatical. I want to say the brain doesn't really use such formal models and at some point working memory is just going to break down trying to cognate some impossibly tangled sentence. So I don't believe creativity is necessarily infinite. But you know it's like mapping legal chess moves. If you make a decision tree of potential things you could say in a situation that made sense, very quickly you'd have more branches than protons in the universe. So, yeah, there's that.
Interestingly David Chalmers wrote a chapter comparing brain functions and gastrointestinal functions, the former being information processing and the latter physical processing that if it did info processing (if it accidently manifested cns) it'd be incidental. But I'm not surprized there's be neurological activity since food is one of the 4 F's of natural selection, also probably the reason we have extra sensitive hands and balls. I won't even try to speculate what's going on though.
My own theory is cns is spread out all over in really specific areas where two systems link, where one side effectively simulates the analog features on an experience on a topographical map, and overlaying that map are "decisionmaking registors" (for lack of a better term, I mean they're neural columns) that register the feature for an executive decisionmaking platform to act on, which works off its own map (I think of it like the features are push calls to decisionmaking reflection). It lets different action systems coordinate off that map. They think that because if one system could do it on its own, link feature to action directly like binocular vision, then it'd be an uncns reflex as Eziquiel Morsella discovered. It's just when multiple modalities have to coordinate, the theory goes, that that fearure-call link is cns. So the idea is each transaction registrating a feature to that exec map is an atom of cns. The more coverage the greater the "attention." The catch is it happens in different modalities, so you're supposed to look a each one.
I like the idea you could theoretically measure it with a sum of derivative equations, signals passed per second, to measure the flow of cns as the volume of information being processed on.
