How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker [2/39]

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[omegavalerius]

Have you ever read the comment sections on Youtube? There is most definitely a lot of random noise that goes on in people's brains.

[kshackleton]

Every brain assembled itself. That is a simple fact. Your brain, and you, started out from a single cell, which divided, grew, and divided again until it became you.

[saintpine]

@jbat100 said: " yet any task has to be broken down into the most ridiculously simple steps for them to do anything useful."

The brain takes many years to bring into the subconscious the control of the body, you cannot do much in multitasking consciously, try cleaning a window while typing your friends number in your cell phone, while mentally summing the number from 1 to 20.

The computer has a very high level of multitasking, and is designed to do the best with the resources available.

[jbat100]

@saintpine yet any task has to be broken down into the most ridiculously simple steps for them to do anything useful.

[saintpine]

"computers have a limited number of connections, brains have trillions"!!!

A good single computer nowaday can go well over 100 billion connections in the circuitry. (CPU, GPU, RAM, other chips) and well over 8 trillion cells including a 1 TB hard disk in the count.

[rhatcher010]

I love everything I'm hearing. Its a meal for me to digest. Unrelated, the subject matter would have that much more impact if Douglas Rain's HAL 9000 were reading it. Just a fun thought.

[TheNoisemaster]

@omegavalerius nice

[Thrashaero]

@kshackleton i love it when people who think they're schooled in philosohpy can call bs so quickly against these science based explanations which are very cogent and are actually mind opening on the subject of mind philosophy. they want to stick with their old philosophical idols who may have theorized 'interesting' perspectives on reality that spawned other ideas, but are now being phased out with better information. the core ideas can still apply. it's the specifics that get tricky.

[Thrashaero]

@mahadragon that's because he's answering less philosophically and more scientifically. what he's saying is that the mind with it's information and computation is on another level that is emergent from the smaller parts. looking at neurons you can't see thoughts. but if you look at the neurons in a vast net, you might begin to see thoughts. kind of like the data on your computer. each bit says nothing, but as an ocean of bits may portray a picture or a program or a principle with its reasons.

[mahadragon]

Pinker: "Information and computation reside in patterns of data and in relations of logic independent of the physical medium that carries them." Dude, can you please speak simple english? Even Einstein didn't talk like this when answering philosophical questions.

[GBart]

"The word noise implies that the system is faulty or needs fixing"

No, it doesn't. It just means that something extra is there, sort of random and unnecessary. It's imprecise, but accurate in probabilistic terms.

[GBart]

"The question of how or why living things do grow in ever increasing complexity is always ignored."

That's exactly what the theory of evolution is. It's... the opposite of ignored.