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How difficult is it to define a brain? We know that the brain must be somewhere hidden in the genome [which] fits in a CD-ROM. It's not that complica… - Joscha Bach
" "How difficult is it to define a brain? We know that the brain must be somewhere hidden in the genome [which] fits in a CD-ROM. It's not that complicated. It's easier than Microsoft Windows. ...[A]bout 2% of the genome is coding for proteins, and maybe about 10%... tells you when to express which protein, and the remainder is mostly garbage. It's old viruses that are left over and it's never been properly deleted [etc.] because there are no real code revisions in the genome. ...How much of this 10%, [i.e.,] about 75 megabytes code for the brain, we don't really know. What we do know is that we share almost all of this with mice. Genetically speaking, a human is a pretty big mouse, with a few bits changed to fix some of the genetic expressions. ...Most of the stuff there is going to code for cells and metabolism and what your body looks like, [etc.]...
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About Joscha Bach
, also known as “the wizard of consciousness”(born 1973 in Weimar, Germany) is a cognitive scientist focusing on cognitive architectures, models of mental representation, emotion, motivation and sociality. Achievements include research in novel data compression algorithm using concurrent entropy models; development of microPsi cognitive architecture for modeling emotion, motivation, mental representation. In 2000, Bach graduated with a diploma in Computer Science from Berlin, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy at Osnabrück University, Germany, in 2006. Before joining , he worked as a visiting researcher at the and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Fact finding reports by the and found that Bach’s research was supported with more than $150,000 by the Foundation.
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Additional quotes by Joscha Bach
How does... representation by simulation work? ...If you are a brain and you want to understand sound, you have to model it. ...Neurons do not want to do 20 Khz. That's way too fast for them. They like something like 20 Hz. So... you need to make a [which] measures the amount of energy at different frequencies. ...This ...in our ears ...transforms energy of sound at different frequency intervals into energy measurements... This is something that the brain can model. ...[A] neurosimulator tries to recreate these patterns. If it can predict the next input from the cochlea, then it understands the sound.
For all practical purposes, the universe is a pattern generator, and the mind "makes sense" of these patterns by encoding them according to the regularities it can find. Thus, the representation of a concept in an intelligent system is not a pointer to a "thing in reality", but a set of hierarchical constraints over (for instance perceptual) data.
If you take the activation at different levels of these networks and you... enhance this activation a little... you get stuff that looks very psychadelic, which might be similar to what happens if you put certain illegal substances into people and enhance the activity on certain layers of their visual processing.
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