[ExI] how large is a human mind?

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Sat Jan 5 17:39:31 UTC 2013


On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 7:53 PM,  <ablainey at aol.com> wrote:

> I wouldn't agree. While we both know what "dogs" are and can converse
> meaningfully about dogs, the personal experiences and subsequent neural
> pathways that have been constructed in order to create the Dog recognisers
> will be very different.

### Well, when you saw a dachshund, a few million recognizers fired,
running analyses mostly at low levels (lines, colors, basic shapes),
with a small number of higher level recognizers (dog, animal, mammal,
mine, beloved) being active as well. You had a personal experience but
the grunt work of creating it was done by recognizers that predictably
fire in response to common fragments of human experience. You could
rewire each one of them completely, yet as long as the rewired
versions still reacted to the same inputs with the same outputs, your
experience would not change. When exposed to the sight of a dachshund
both your and my neural pathways will produce the same general story
(brown, longish, moving, animal), plus some individual details (when
you saw your first dachshund or if you like them), and this implies
that the parts of our brains devoted to seeing dogs are similar on the
conceptual level, even though the individual patterns of synapses in
recognizers that generate the story are completely different.

It is similar to noting that the exact patterns of dopant atom
distribution in the millions of transistors in our computers are
completely different, yet the transistors themselves are highly
reproducible and replaceable - they predictably react to common
inputs. Just as you can take a processor from my iphone and put it in
yours, you should be able to take the highly idiosyncratic recognizers
from your V1 cortex and put them into mine with no difference in my
subjective experience, as long as you wire the inputs and outputs
correctly.
------------------

> So an average storage value + ?% allowing for individual difference may be
> sufficient for each recogniser?

### The higher you go in the conceptual hierarchy of the brain, the
more individual percentage in the recognizers: from near 0% in primary
sensory and motor cortices to much higher percentages in the highest
order areas.

Rafal



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