Conquer Club

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02971-1

Now, can we please stop talking about people uploading their brain to computers or other stupid stuff that has no bearing on reality.

Hakwan Lau, a neuroscientist at Riken Center for Brain Science in Wako, Japan, and one of the authors of the letter, says that some researchers in the consciousness field are uncomfortable with what they perceive as a discrepancy between IIT’s scientific merit and the considerable attention it receives from the popular media because of how it is promoted by advocates. “Has IIT become a leading theory because of academic acceptance first, or is it because of the popular noise that kind of forced the academics to give it acknowledgement?”, Lau asks.

Does this make it more likely or less likely that people will have relationships with their phone's OS?

Can you give an example or two of when DY was proven right in the past? Sounds like it's a thing, judging by the title....

I've had quite a few arguments about psychology on here. One thing that comes up often is the idea that cryogenics will eventually allow people to upload their brains to a computer. I called it "pseudoscience" or "science fiction". Some scientists wrote a letter proving me right*.

*technically, they were only agreeing with me, but crotchety old DY is going mainstream in the science world.


People who have been following my posts will notice a theme. First, I called nutrition studies mostly hogwash. A few years later, retraction rates of nutrition papers hit over 50%.

I called the chemical imbalance hypothesis of mental illness bs, and every experiment has shown it to be.

DoomYoshi wrote:https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02971-1

Now, can we please stop talking about people uploading their brain to computers or other stupid stuff that has no bearing on reality.

Hakwan Lau, a neuroscientist at Riken Center for Brain Science in Wako, Japan, and one of the authors of the letter, says that some researchers in the consciousness field are uncomfortable with what they perceive as a discrepancy between IIT’s scientific merit and the considerable attention it receives from the popular media because of how it is promoted by advocates. “Has IIT become a leading theory because of academic acceptance first, or is it because of the popular noise that kind of forced the academics to give it acknowledgement?”, Lau asks.

https://youtu.be/KRB-iHGHSqk?si=RyG1FnctXu1fV4nL Age restricted or I'd have embedded it.

People constantly conflate consciousness with other things such as emotions, ego (yes, even self-preservation), and biological/sexual constraints. When advanced AI does arrive, it will be able to constantly modify and rewrite its own code. Such a completely mutable consciousness (sense of self) will be radically different from the human concept of consciousness. Human beings are already putting their brains on computers in myriad ways, including writing code, but don't expect the result to be anything like your biological, mammalian brain.

Lol, thanks Yosh

DoomYoshi wrote:https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02971-1

Now, can we please stop talking about people uploading their brain to computers or other stupid stuff that has no bearing on reality.

Hakwan Lau, a neuroscientist at Riken Center for Brain Science in Wako, Japan, and one of the authors of the letter, says that some researchers in the consciousness field are uncomfortable with what they perceive as a discrepancy between IIT’s scientific merit and the considerable attention it receives from the popular media because of how it is promoted by advocates. “Has IIT become a leading theory because of academic acceptance first, or is it because of the popular noise that kind of forced the academics to give it acknowledgement?”, Lau asks.

Nothing in this article offers any evidence that IIT is wrong.

The only claims are that

1. It's untested or untestable, and
2. that it's got too much attention in the media.

Whether it's untestable I doubt. Many things seem untestable, until someone figures out a test. We'll see.

That it gets too much attention in the media is probably true, but hardly a serious condemnation. What the media chooses to write about is no reflection on the underlying science.

DoomYoshi wrote:I've had quite a few arguments about psychology on here. One thing that comes up often is the idea that cryogenics will eventually allow people to upload their brains to a computer. I called it "pseudoscience" or "science fiction". Some scientists wrote a letter proving me right*.

*technically, they were only agreeing with me, but crotchety old DY is going mainstream in the science world.


People who have been following my posts will notice a theme. First, I called nutrition studies mostly hogwash. A few years later, retraction rates of nutrition papers hit over 50%.

That retraction rates of nutrition papers are up doesn't mean that the remainder are hogwash. On the contrary, it means that research institutions are cleaning house and upping the average quality of what remains.

DoomYoshi wrote:I called the chemical imbalance hypothesis of mental illness bs, and every experiment has shown it to be.

On this one you're probably right.

Dukasaur wrote:Nothing in this article offers any evidence that IIT is wrong.

The only claims are that

1. It's untested or untestable, and
2. that it's got too much attention in the media.

Whether it's untestable I doubt. Many things seem untestable, until someone figures out a test. We'll see.

That it gets too much attention in the media is probably true, but hardly a serious condemnation. What the media chooses to write about is no reflection on the underlying science.

Similarly, I can't say the Palm reading medium on King Street is wrong either. But the general tenor in the public press is that there is more science backing up the computer analogy. Really, there isn't anything backing it up other than that it's a neat analogy. Even scientists can fall prone to this, like with the recent box jellyfish example. They are trying to upload the box jellyfish brain into a computer. Only trouble - no central nervous system.

That retraction rates of nutrition papers are up doesn't mean that the remainder are hogwash. On the contrary, it means that research institutions are cleaning house and upping the average quality of what remains.

Nope. The quality is still generally garbage because of one methodology that is anti-scientific. I refer to food diaries. The way most science in that division is done is questions like "In the past year how many grams of avocado did you consume in a week"? Literally no meaningful conclusion can be drawn by such studies. However, this is the accepted methodology of that field. It's not like I'm alone in calling this out, this has been realized for many years. Not only is there a "reproduction crisis" whereas the results are not reproducible. But the data is bad since it ignores biological processes (see the below link). The good type of nutrition research looks at individual metabolic processes at the molecular, cellular and system level. The vast majority of nutrition research only considers things at the individual or population level and they never even try to come to anything resembling a cellular explanation.

There are countless articles about how bad this field is. Take this one " https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7350526/ " for example. They are focusing on the fact that most people just don't know how much they are consuming or they misrepresent it. My problem goes deeper than that. Even if I know precisely how many grams of avocado I ate per week, I don't think you can gather any meaningful information from such a study. All it could do is help cellular biologists know which molecules to check for possible effects. But we can do that already without the nutritional study. We really don't need anymore 12 person sample size self-reported study proving that 20g per day of avocado can lower your glycemic index.

Here's a scary sign. Even the relatively basic sciences like ecology have no basis in reality:
https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/6000/

They gave 200 analysts the same data. Not only was there variations in the results (expected) but the variation was so great that the conclusions can't be trusted.

Notably, there were no errors found in the methods. Just different methods of analysis give different results. When I have a chance to read more in-depth I'll find some problems. The biggest one I see in ecology is people using ANOVA for different set sizes. The larger the discrepancy in set size, the worse the method fails.

DoomYoshi wrote:Here's a scary sign. Even the relatively basic sciences like ecology have no basis in reality:
https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/6000/

They gave 200 analysts the same data. Not only was there variations in the results (expected) but the variation was so great that the conclusions can't be trusted.

Notably, there were no errors found in the methods. Just different methods of analysis give different results. When I have a chance to read more in-depth I'll find some problems. The biggest one I see in ecology is people using ANOVA for different set sizes. The larger the discrepancy in set size, the worse the method fails.

What ever answer you seek, you will find studies (and statistics) to support it.

Here's a scary sign. Even the relatively basic sciences like ecology have no basis in reality:

I would not call those relatively basic, far from it.

That paper shows how NOT developed those fields are. Analytic teams get different results based on how they analyze the problems using different models they can choose. There is no consensus on how they should approach the problems.

Added - to be clear we are looking at ecology and evolutionary biology.