<div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 4:12 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
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<div>On 31/10/2025 00:38, bill w wrote:<br>
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<pre><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">I have read several times in these chats the assumption that one cannot understand something as complicated as themselves.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">
</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">Why not? It sounds reasonable but what's the basis for it? bill w</div></pre>
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This is a red herring. The main problem with it is that we have no
agreed common meaning for the word 'understand', so different people
can interpret it differently.<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Agreed, I was clear to specify *fully understand* and "everything there is to know about a human brain." I will say more about this below.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div>
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Jason has gone into some details of an information-theory view,
which is fine, but hardly applies to real-world scenarios. I think
the main issue is not what is theoretically possible, but what do we
need?<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I'll rank degrees of understanding for varying purposes:</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Low level understanding:</div><div dir="auto">- Knowing about neurons and their disease pathologies </div><div dir="auto">- Finding medicines to treat biological deficiencies of neurons, neurotransmitters, brain metabolism, etc.</div><div dir="auto">- How neurons behave and react under different conditions </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Mid level understanding:</div><div dir="auto">- Knowing the algorithms brain regions and cortical columns employ to solve various problems </div><div dir="auto">- Knowing the inputs and outputs of this processing for the millions of cortical columns and hundreds of brain regions </div><div dir="auto">- Knowing the meaning of the messages/information exchanged and passed between brain regions </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">High level architectural understanding:</div><div dir="auto">- Knowing what deficits correspond to brain damage to different areas </div><div dir="auto">- Planning a brain surgery to be minimally disruptive </div><div dir="auto">- Knowing which brain regions are connected to which others and the information flows between them</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Top level (Mental/Psyche) understanding:</div><div dir="auto">- Knowing the person's general personality traits, dispositions, preferences, abilities, etc.</div><div dir="auto">- Being able to model with some accuracy, how a person might behave in different circumstances</div><div dir="auto">- How to best tweak or nudge the person via various psychiatric forms of treatment, towards some productive change in behavior or personality.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Full/complete understanding:</div><div dir="auto">- Predicting treatment outcomes with perfect as accuracy </div><div dir="auto">- Predicting behavior with perfect accuracy </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">What the word "understand" means to me, is knowing something well enough to be able to model it and make predictions about how the thing in question will respond in different imagined scenarios. The better the degree of understanding, the higher the degree of predictive accuracy. Perfect prediction requires a complete or full understanding, of both the object and the environment (for the particular scenario).</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div>
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Individually, we hardly understand anything at all. How many car
drivers actually have much of an understanding of the car they
drive? But they all have an understanding of what they need to know
in order to drive.<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Right new should not confuse "understanding how to drive" with "understanding how their car works"</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Even mechanics, while knowing how cars generally work, have to look up manufacturer specific guides for how to perform different operations on different vehicles. And even then, we can't expect them to understand the thermodynamic details of the combustion reaction, the molecular chemistry of the tires, or the software of the GPS navigation system.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div>
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I think I understand how my computer works. Which is laughable if
you take into account all the things that make up a computer, both
hardware and software. I hardly understand a tiny fraction of it
all. But I can still build one from parts I can buy, install an
operating system and application software and do useful things with
it. I understand enough. Computers are enormously complicated, but
people, collectively, have created them. No single person could do
it. No single person understands everyting about a computer. But we
have them.<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">It really is quite miraculous when you think about it.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div>
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So I think the important thing is not "understand" something, but
"Understand x about" something, to some practical end involving x.
The question is: What do you want to do? Then you can decide what
you need to understand.<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Yes, I don't mean to discourage attempts at research because it ball adds to the collective understanding of human civilization, even though no one person or brain can read every book and hold that collective knowledge in their head (we can at least look up the part we need to know to achieve the goal we want).</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">It is perhaps a bit like a CPU in a computer. A CPU can only hold a handful of register values in its "head" at a time. Nevertheless, by cycling values in and out, and offloading them to eternal memory/storage, there is no limit to what a CPU is able to compute (or do).</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">So we might think of ourselves as individual CPUs, accessing the memory we need, loading it into our heads, and performing a small discrete task that inches is closer to a goal.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Jason</div></div>