Ali Moeeny's posterous

The old internal battle of those who emigrate!

Big questions

So if intelligence is basically algorithms (and Intelligence is what we used to see in biological beings and traditionally associated with the essence of being a human) what about awareness?
If personality could be defined as patterns of parameters of the mind/brain that would give rise to a set of behaviors (and attitudes and ...) that is perceived externally as a personality, what about the awareness itself?

Strategery for iPhone, Intelligence and hard problems in Neuroscience

I was playing Strategery and all of a sudden it dawned on me.
It's a bit silly though, now that I understand it I know that other people had knew this for several decades! and I have read a lot about it but it hasn't been clear to me till now.

Intelligence which we (humans generally not scientists) assign it to live beings is just algorithms. I mean the nature of intelligence is nothing but algorithms. If you have something (anything, a mechanical device, a software a game a car) that executes a well developed algorithm (or lets say software) it looks (and is) intelligent.

But this is not the end of it. Personality is a pattern of parameters in this algorithm, I mean we say someone is aggressive, someone is passive, someone don't bother with others until they interfere with his or her life and so on, all these personalities are a set of parameters in his or her software (mind, brain).

That is incredible, that might sound OK or obvious to many people but it was not this obvious to me.

By the way Strategery is not a magical game (it's absolutely addictive though), it is a very very simple strategy game on iPhone in which you control one of the 5 countries of the world and in this world you can either wait (to develop your resources) or you can attack other countries! It's a strategy game and your success depends on your strategy! You may be aggressive and always attack others whenever you have the minimum amount of resources (to prevent them from attacking you) or you might try to go to a safe corner and develop your resources while other countries are killing each other. You may divide and conquer, you may keep a weak country as a shield between you and a resourceful one to buy yourself some time to develop. As your rate of growth depends on your contiguous size you need more complicated strategies to get out of a hard situation and so on.

When playing the game you get feelings about countries, you feel that some are aggressive some are more conservative, some are stupid some don't understand collaboration and common interest. And all these are simple algorithms running on a low power iPhone processor (not a giant supercomputer).

 

Brain's processing speed

Unlike man made processing devices, brain does not have a clock (not a clock to keep the time, but a clock to synchronize the processing and communication) so it does not have a unified speed like a computer processor or a motherboard bus would have.

Yet speed and capacity of brains are limited. Most of these limits originate from two factors, nerve cell membrane integration time constants and spike travel speeds (which is also related by membrane time constants).

So basically if a biological brain had shorter membrane time constants it could be faster.

I was wondering if there is anyway to demonstrate this empirically. Like when a brain (or a piece of a brain) is cooled off, or there might be genetic manipulations to tweak the membrane proteins or ...

More on brain overloading!

Cool,

Along with the discussions we had on brain hacking,

Is it possible to overload your brain?
If you mean overload it so that it breaks? I don't think so, I mean overloading with information or hard tasks or things like that.
It is possible to overload the brain emotionally so that it malfunctions, but it is not actually "over" loading, it is like having malicious software on your computer not overloading your CPU.

But if you give your brain too much input, like trying to memorize lots of things in a short period of time, you would start loosing the ones you memorized first or not being able to hold the new ones you are trying to learn.

If you try to do some heavy process for an extended period (like taking a several hours USMLE exam, or playing action games from morning to morning, or writing serious computer programs all day long ...) you would start missing some inputs, like you would fail to notice the changes in the environment or ignoring events around you and ...

If you overload your brain with stressful situations for long, it would gradually get into a malfunctioning situation or a slow state or blocks inputs or things like that to protect itself maybe!

Spike value

Maybe, output spikes are just pulses that are all the same and have the same value, but surly input spikes are different and have different impact on the receiving cell, for one they have different weights.
But I want to argue that output spike MAY be all the same from the perspective of the synaptic membrane that receives them but it does not mean that the output spikes WE record as electro-physiologist are all the same and we can not extract anything out of their shape.
 

Brain does not control every thing!

You know that? right?

Brain reading, mind reading

I was watching a MR microscopy talk today (it was 10 days ago!).

There would come a time that we would have machines that can scan the brain at molecular level at high temporal resolution.
I cannot imagine what we would do with them. I am sure it would change our lives more than Internet changed our lives.

Not exactly then, but someday later we'd be able to read minds, not only human minds but also animal minds and we'd be able to write to minds and control them and make artificial ones.

Just off the top of my head I should say one thing we might want to do with these brain scanners is to look at very small pieces of the brain and to study them during memory formation and decision making and conscious state transitions and ...   

Strange brains

What would you say if I tell you I work with someone who is so stupid, or lets say so different that for him to learn something as simple as green is for go red is for stop, he needs to practice it thousands of times to get it right just 85% of time.  In the morning when he is just starting fresh he can do it like 90% or even 95% of the time but after a few minutes he is so "tired of thinking" that he keeps doing it at random or more or less random for several hours without bothering to think what red was for and what green was for!

What tools I need!

I was watching Darren Browns BBC channel 4 shows and was thinking about the tools I need. I need to actually read minds not the way he does. I need to actually gain read access to a brain/mind. or better than that, read/write access to a brain/mind.
Do you know what I really want?
I want "root" access!