Jun 13, 2022 01:47 AM
(This post was last modified: Jun 13, 2022 05:04 PM by C C.)
Why can’t you remember being born, learning to walk or saying your first words? What scientists know about ‘infantile amnesia’
https://theconversation.com/why-cant-you...sia-182736
EXCERPTS: . . . If infants can form memories in their first few months, why don’t people remember things from that earliest stage of life? It still isn’t clear whether people experience infantile amnesia because we can’t form autobiographical memories, or whether we just have no way to retrieve them. No one knows for sure what’s going on, but scientists have a few guesses.
One is that autobiographical memories require you to have some sense of self. You need to be able to think about your behavior with respect to how it relates to others.
[...] Another possible explanation for infantile amnesia is that because infants don’t have language until later in the second year of life, they can’t form narratives about their own lives that they can later recall.
Finally, the hippocampus, which is the region of the brain that’s largely responsible for memory, isn’t fully developed in the infancy period.
Scientists will continue to investigate how each of these factors might contribute to why you can’t remember much, if anything, about your life before the age of 2... (MORE - missing details)
The mind is more than a machine
https://www.noemamag.com/the-mind-is-mor...a-machine/
The eccentric logician Kurt Gödel revolutionized the study of mathematics with his famous incompleteness theorem, but the most compelling implications of his hypothesis might be in what it means for the study of the mind and consciousness.
EXCERPT (Bobby Azarian): . . . But the true brilliance of Gödel’s theorem was not that it constructed a mathematical statement that could not be proven true or false. Gödel bumped the loopiness up a level by creating a conjecture that was true, but unprovable. Notice that the following self-referential statement is not just about itself, but also its own provability:
“This statement has no proof.”
It was no easy feat, but Gödel created a mathematical statement that was the numerical equivalent of that sentence. The interesting thing about this particular proposition is that it is, in fact, true — it has no proof. We don’t even have to check, because if the proof did exist, it would mean that the statement is true. But it says that it has no proof, so once again, proving the statement would only disprove it.
Even though it cannot be proven with the axioms of the system and the rules of inference, mathematicians can clearly see that its truth is self-evident by focusing on what the symbols mean. Gödel’s true but unprovable proposition proves that there are truths that exist outside the realm of what can be deduced using symbolic logic or computation.
Because mathematicians could see the truth of an undecidable conjecture, the great theoretical physicist Roger Penrose later argued that the mind must be doing something that goes beyond raw computation. In other words, the brain must be more than a symbol-shuffling machine. As he wrote in a 1994 paper:
The inescapable conclusion [of Gödel’s theorem] seems to be: Mathematicians are not using a knowably sound calculation procedure in order to ascertain mathematical truth. We deduce that mathematical understanding — the means whereby mathematicians arrive at their conclusions with respect to mathematical truth — cannot be reduced to blind calculation!
While Penrose can be credited for popularizing this insight, which was proposed by the British philosopher John Lucas nearly three decades earlier, it seems that Gödel himself was aware of that implication of his theorem, as can be seen by this famous quote of his: “Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.”
What exactly is the difference between mind and machine? Machines compute, minds understand. They allow us to see truths that a purely algorithmic intelligence would be blind to. What is it that allows this curious ability that we call understanding? Conscious experience, presumably, which enables us to not just reason, but to reflect on reasoning itself.
“Gödel proved that there are truths that exist outside the realm of what can be deduced using symbolic logic or computation.”
While Penrose was justified in arguing that the mind is not a Turing machine, he made what many consider an unjustified leap when he proposed that the brain must then be some kind of quantum computer. Although this theory should not be dismissed on the grounds that it invokes a quantum explanation, the truth is that right now it is not taken seriously by most scientists working on the problem of consciousness. The most well-known criticism, supported by physicists like Max Tegmark, says that the brain is too warm, wet and noisy to sustain the kind of coherent quantum state that Penrose believes is responsible for conscious processing.
However, it is worth pointing out that researchers now think a growing number of biological processes exploit quantum mechanics — like bird navigation, which uses quantum entanglement, and photosynthesis, which involves quantum tunneling. If quantum biology is real and takes place inside “warm and wet” systems, who’s to say that quantum neurobiology is impossible? If there’s some computational advantage to a mechanical process that exists in nature, natural selection will typically find a way to leverage it... (MORE - missing details)
https://theconversation.com/why-cant-you...sia-182736
EXCERPTS: . . . If infants can form memories in their first few months, why don’t people remember things from that earliest stage of life? It still isn’t clear whether people experience infantile amnesia because we can’t form autobiographical memories, or whether we just have no way to retrieve them. No one knows for sure what’s going on, but scientists have a few guesses.
One is that autobiographical memories require you to have some sense of self. You need to be able to think about your behavior with respect to how it relates to others.
[...] Another possible explanation for infantile amnesia is that because infants don’t have language until later in the second year of life, they can’t form narratives about their own lives that they can later recall.
Finally, the hippocampus, which is the region of the brain that’s largely responsible for memory, isn’t fully developed in the infancy period.
Scientists will continue to investigate how each of these factors might contribute to why you can’t remember much, if anything, about your life before the age of 2... (MORE - missing details)
The mind is more than a machine
https://www.noemamag.com/the-mind-is-mor...a-machine/
The eccentric logician Kurt Gödel revolutionized the study of mathematics with his famous incompleteness theorem, but the most compelling implications of his hypothesis might be in what it means for the study of the mind and consciousness.
EXCERPT (Bobby Azarian): . . . But the true brilliance of Gödel’s theorem was not that it constructed a mathematical statement that could not be proven true or false. Gödel bumped the loopiness up a level by creating a conjecture that was true, but unprovable. Notice that the following self-referential statement is not just about itself, but also its own provability:
“This statement has no proof.”
It was no easy feat, but Gödel created a mathematical statement that was the numerical equivalent of that sentence. The interesting thing about this particular proposition is that it is, in fact, true — it has no proof. We don’t even have to check, because if the proof did exist, it would mean that the statement is true. But it says that it has no proof, so once again, proving the statement would only disprove it.
Even though it cannot be proven with the axioms of the system and the rules of inference, mathematicians can clearly see that its truth is self-evident by focusing on what the symbols mean. Gödel’s true but unprovable proposition proves that there are truths that exist outside the realm of what can be deduced using symbolic logic or computation.
Because mathematicians could see the truth of an undecidable conjecture, the great theoretical physicist Roger Penrose later argued that the mind must be doing something that goes beyond raw computation. In other words, the brain must be more than a symbol-shuffling machine. As he wrote in a 1994 paper:
The inescapable conclusion [of Gödel’s theorem] seems to be: Mathematicians are not using a knowably sound calculation procedure in order to ascertain mathematical truth. We deduce that mathematical understanding — the means whereby mathematicians arrive at their conclusions with respect to mathematical truth — cannot be reduced to blind calculation!
While Penrose can be credited for popularizing this insight, which was proposed by the British philosopher John Lucas nearly three decades earlier, it seems that Gödel himself was aware of that implication of his theorem, as can be seen by this famous quote of his: “Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.”
What exactly is the difference between mind and machine? Machines compute, minds understand. They allow us to see truths that a purely algorithmic intelligence would be blind to. What is it that allows this curious ability that we call understanding? Conscious experience, presumably, which enables us to not just reason, but to reflect on reasoning itself.
“Gödel proved that there are truths that exist outside the realm of what can be deduced using symbolic logic or computation.”
While Penrose was justified in arguing that the mind is not a Turing machine, he made what many consider an unjustified leap when he proposed that the brain must then be some kind of quantum computer. Although this theory should not be dismissed on the grounds that it invokes a quantum explanation, the truth is that right now it is not taken seriously by most scientists working on the problem of consciousness. The most well-known criticism, supported by physicists like Max Tegmark, says that the brain is too warm, wet and noisy to sustain the kind of coherent quantum state that Penrose believes is responsible for conscious processing.
However, it is worth pointing out that researchers now think a growing number of biological processes exploit quantum mechanics — like bird navigation, which uses quantum entanglement, and photosynthesis, which involves quantum tunneling. If quantum biology is real and takes place inside “warm and wet” systems, who’s to say that quantum neurobiology is impossible? If there’s some computational advantage to a mechanical process that exists in nature, natural selection will typically find a way to leverage it... (MORE - missing details)