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the brain - too complex to understand?

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We may be intelligent in relation to other creatures in the world, but that does not mean that we have the intelligence to understand everything there is to understand. The mystery of the universe and its dimensions is what makes it so great.

I think that one day, humans will understand how a brain works, but the complexity will stop us understanding it for decades.
 
mm sure its possible to understand the workings of the brain ... and no its not necessary to be consious of every aspect of the mind to arrive at an answer ... or for that matter to solve any problem. Im sure that one day we will know the mind works but that day is a ways off (at least 100 - 200 years) ... furthermore in terms of self understanding ppl in the past have achieved measures close to this ... Buddhists refer to such knowledge as enlightenment ...

... but if u were to go the whole way, and truly know every aspect of how your mind runs ... well who the hell knows what ud might become ...
 
Complexity doesn't mean that it cannot be broken down. The schmatics for a motherboard, or a processor are so complex it is unlikely that a single person would know exactly what everything is, but it was created. Many systems evolve like taht, yes we could very possibly understand the general means which govern the brain. But, if you define "understand" as to mean that you can perfectly predict what it will do under any circumstance I belive no.

I say this because I think that the breain contains millions of flaws which give us the characteristic and ability to create new things. It is why we can't predict exactly what is going to happen at any time with systems taht aren't perfect. The brain is amazing, and through imperfections it reaches a philisophical perfection.
 
Yes the imperfections in our body, the ruthless pruning of brain cells during childhood gives us our characteristics. The fact that no two human's brains are even close to identical means that concepts such as creativity, and uniqueness is possible. Its one thing to understand synapses, a totally different thing to understand how the system works.
 
In psychology that assumption is widely accepted. No proof that I know of. It appeals to me from an intuitive sense, though. In order to fully understand the brain you would need a complete model of it stored in memory. The model would require storage space exactly equal to the size of your brain. You would require additional resources on top of this to be able to comprehend what you are storing. Of course, a less-than-complete understanding of the brain is quite obtainable.

The emulator analogy actually works pretty well. If you want to emulate a playstation game console, a more powerful and complicated platform is always required.
 
The brain is nothing extraordinary. It is a computer. It stores and processes information. We have come a long way in understanding the mechanisms of our brains, and already have simple neural network systems and software developed. It is simply a matter of time before we are able to build machines and write software capable of the massive parallel processing of the human brain. The volume of information storage required will be the easiest part. There are already AI programs which can learn NEW information and make deductions about unknown data, after an initial teaching phase. As the computers we build become more powerful we will eventually create machines as intelligent and seemingly alive as you and I. Things will get really interesting after computers surpass our own ability to compute data, and make choices. I believe the timeline for this is much shorter than most people imagine. Perhaps in 50 years we will have our first electronic human brain. In one hundred years we will probably no longer require the biological bodies we are so found of.

For an interesting, thought provoking, and entertaining practically plain English read on the subject, I highly suggest: The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Raymond Kurzweil.
 
Originally posted by: DrPizza
Didn't someone prove at some point that to understand the brain would take something more complicated than the brain - a system cannot understand itself using that system alone?

Help, please...
Click to expand...


It doesn't really need proving, depending on your definition of 'understanding itself', it's a pretty simple concept - understanding and meaning take up space in your brain, to store a complete set of 'understanding and meaning' for everything in your brain, by definition, takes more space than your brain can hold.

Think of it like a harddrive - if you are going to add a description of the contents of every sector on the harddrive, where are you going to write that description to ?


 
afaik all we need is to figure out the encoding/decoding of input. i.e. memory. how it's stored. how it's even encoded from a visual/audio/idea. we haven't even figured out DNA? i just think it's a lot more simplistic than what's been mentioned. it's just a massive algorithm we need to figure out with apparently the tools we don't have. kinda like a computer to a midieval knight. ask him to interface with it, when all it is, is binary code.
 
Perhaps we do not need to have a memory capacity larger than our memory capacity to store itself.... lossless compression! -unless our brains already do it perfectly.
 
Originally posted by: Indigopeacock
Perhaps we do not need to have a memory capacity larger than our memory capacity to store itself.... lossless compression! -unless our brains already do it perfectly.
Click to expand...


yes its possible to understand it. We can store it because we know that thus and such happens in this situation, that situation, as well as this one. Another thing happens here and there. So we have an average of 1:2.5 compression in that example.
 
I believe as much as i want not to, that understanding the brain is not possible by us, what exactly defines life(no not in the simple biology terms as we only know as one intelligent species), or even things such as me sitting here and typing this......why am I??, to understand things like this you would have to step outside of your body and human understanding(for lack of a better word) and be completely "outside of the box" and terms and descriptions as such, (which is not possible) and only then would one be able to understand....and who knows what that being would want to understand...of course that would mean that, that being would even be able to understand in the human sence of the word...

Evolution, laungage, physics: all human terms, used to accpet, but not to understand why.........and plz dont respond with...."we understand physics" i mean why is there physics?? things like what it the universe...no not just labeling it and classifying...the type of what is outside of the universe? question....which of course can not probably be described using terms like "outside"....my brain hits a wall after that........

sorry if you dont get what i am saying...its not exactly easy to describe what i am trying share what i think ;-)

Of course i do believe that a more advanced "species"(not in todays sence of the word) would be able to understand all this....but of course as we find the keys to doors each day...there are always more doors behind them.....
 
Some are very complicated and we will never understand how they work,

Others not so. You can find a lot of the second kind at 1600 Pensylvania Ave.
 
Originally posted by: Yellow Dog
Some are very complicated and we will never understand how they work,

Others not so. You can find a lot of the second kind at 1600 Pensylvania Ave.
Click to expand...

lol

 
Orignally posted by: Velk
It doesn't really need proving, depending on your definition of 'understanding itself', it's a pretty simple concept - understanding and meaning take up space in your brain, to store a complete set of 'understanding and meaning' for everything in your brain, by definition, takes more space than your brain can hold.

Think of it like a harddrive - if you are going to add a description of the contents of every sector on the harddrive, where are you going to write that description to ?
Click to expand...

Originally posted by: Indigopeacock
Perhaps we do not need to have a memory capacity larger than our memory capacity to store itself.... lossless compression! -unless our brains already do it perfectly.
Click to expand...

That doesn't actually matter - going back to my fairly basic hard drive analogy it's like saying 'But what if the files are zipped !'. It simply doesn't matter. A record of the contents of something plus the contents of something take up more space than the contents alone do. There just isn't any way to get around that.



 
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