• flippinfreebird@lemmy.today
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    5 days ago

    I remember a quote from Civ along the lines of “if the brain was simple enough for us to understand, our minds would be to simple to understand it.”

    • silasmariner@programming.dev
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      4 days ago

      It’s a pretty trivial informational paradox for a mind to comprehend itself – comprehension of its comprehension of itself then needs further comprehension… So yeah. Only a much more complex mind can understand a given mind

      • howrar@lemmy.ca
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        4 days ago

        We don’t need a single mind to understand the entirety of how the brain works. One of the powers of human knowledge is its distributed nature arising from our ability to write things down and create abstractions. What matters in the end is that we as a collective understand the brain.

        • silasmariner@programming.dev
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          2 days ago

          But then you just have the same paradox writ large. Maybe we, as a collective, can entertain understanding of a single mind - but the generalisation of us as ‘the mind’ rather than ‘a mind’ includes all of us, and must therefore be left wanting

          • silasmariner@programming.dev
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            2 days ago

            Actually wait this is glib as fuck and probably wrong, I retract it. You could have the capability to understand, given specific allocation of resources but only do it rarely, without violating any information theory fundamentals