

Ask HN: Do you believe that mind and brain are separate entities? - tejask

I always get into this debate of mind vs. brain (mostly with non-techies). Being an AI/Neuroscience student and researcher, I am fairly convinced that mind is nothing but a physical synonym for the working of our neocortex. Does anyone in this community believe that  mind is formless, non-physical, separate from the brain and thus can never be completely simulated? If yes, why?
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mjburgess
" mind is formless, non-physical, separate from the brain ", well it can be
reduced and explained in terms of the functioning of the brain.

"Functioning" is not an object and cannot be encountered, to assume the mind
is _substance_ is the category mistake made, and why people leap to something
non-physical: if it must be a substance it cannot be physical, for sure.

As for "completely simulated", I do not believe that computers - as we now use
them - are capable of "simulating" a mind. The mind is much more than
_symoblic processsing_ : it attaches meaning to information, creates relations
between itself and the world, (amongst many other things). These phenomena are
not information processes and cannot be achieved by Linear Regression (to
characterize Machine Learning accurately enough).

It is important to point out that any scientific explanation of consciousness
is going to be unsatisfyingly reductionistic. Science significantly reduces
experience to a "substance model" where everything can be modeled as
substances in motion ... and thus the mathematical edifice which results is
completely devoid of the vast majority of information which one acquires: the
sound of the cannonball as it his the grass, its colour, significance, etc.

The vast majority of our experience which we may hope to explain is discounted
(necessarily so) in order to be scientific (predict what our next experiences
will be like).

There will be an increasing number of "explanations" of various aspects of
mental functioning based on the structure of the brain, I doubt any of these
will provide anything more compelling than what we have currently.

There are "brute certainties" (brute facts) which are undoubtable and _the
starting point_ for _all_ investigation, scientific or otherwise. This brute
fact is experience, or more accurately, the world of signficance, relations,
awareness, etc. in which the self as well as everything else is embeded
within.

Explanation proceeds as generalization, taking one aspect of Experience and
generalizing to some general property of Experience: pens fall, all objects
fall, all objects in gravitational fields fall.

There is nothing we can appeal to in accounting for Experience itself: there
is nothing else available. Explanation has to end somewhere, and that is the
final - and only tenable - reply to the question of our conscious experience.

~~~
tejask
From what you say, you seem to hint that we will never be able to produce a
human-perfect unsupervised learning rule that can handle all modalities we
perceive and make inferences. As far as classical machine learning is
concerned, many learning rules are domain specific and training/learning
heuristics changes with modalities. However, we are seeing an emergence of
neuroscience informed machine learning, which is slowly uncovering importance
of vital structure within the brain such as hierarchies within the visual
cortex and its actual impact on learning. As far as consciousness is
concerned, it is again tied with the problem of solving learning.

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prtk
Brain is hardware. Mind software that runs on brain. None has any use without
the other. (personal unscientific view)

I would like to read about this where to begin?

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tejask
The reason I said it's one is from the perspective that the software is a
combination of spiking potentials and chemical reactions. If you haven't read
"On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins, you should. Though his results/theory may
not even be close to the real explanation behind our brain, it sets a good
stage for the topic.

