How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero | Quanta Magazine
Yasemin Saplakogluquantamagazine.org
How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero | Quanta Magazine
In the words of neuroscientist Gregory Berns, “only when you consciously confront your brain’s reliance on categories will you be able to imagine outside of its boundaries.” Venturing out of the mind’s perimeter of comfort, in a constant quest for the unknown, liminal creators keep on fueling their imagination by exploring the gray areas that live ... See more
Ness Labs • Liminal Creativity
The first citation given concerns the “uniqueness problem,” which emphasizes a result long known by those of us who worked on IIT: that in systems that have mathematically perfectly symmetric interactions (the specifics are complicated, but just imagine this like a geometric shape), IIT gives conflicting answers as to the boundaries of the consciou... See more
Erik Hoel • Ambitious theories of consciousness are not "scientific misinformation"
Over the past several years, Roger Penrose, a noted physicist and philosopher, has suggested that fine structures in the neurons called tubules perform an exotic form of computation called “quantum computing.” Quantum computing is computing using what are called “qu bits” which take on all possible combinations of solutions simultaneously. Just bec... See more
Ray Kurzweil • The Law of Accelerating Returns « the Kurzweil Library + collections
The brain remains the single most sophisticated object in the known universe—by a staggering margin—even in an era of mobile devices, spacecraft, and particle accelerators. It outpaces our most powerful supercomputers, all within a volume measured in cubic inches, powered by nothing more than a fraction of the calories we consume each day. The stor
... See moreFei-Fei Li • The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI
Grammar rules are just one example of a particular talent in our brain: the ability to discover the general laws that lie behind specific cases. Whether it is in mathematics, language, science, or music, the human brain manages to extract very abstract principles, systematic rules that it can reapply in many different contexts. Take arithmetic, for
... See moreStanislas Dehaene • How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now
On the contrary, mathematics molds itself into a preexisting, innate representation of numerical quantities, which it then extends and refines.
Stanislas Dehaene • How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now
A more controversial application than this scanning-the-brain-to-understand-it scenario is scanning-the-brain-to-download-it. When an entire network of neurons receives input (from the outside world or from other networks of neurons), the signaling amongst them appears at first to be frenzied and random. So the question addressed by the San Diego r... See more