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Re:Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up... by erikpukinskis on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @01:02PM (#13978337)
Your model of cognition is off. When you are thinking about an orange, you don't have an actual orange-like terabyte structure appear in your brain. You think about individual body reactions you might have to an orange, or you think about specific things you could do with an orange. Which slivers of orangeness appear is highly context dependent.

The fact that you have control over your attention... you can direct it to arbitrary things you could do or feel with an orange... that gives you the subjective impression of seeing the whole thing all at once, but that's just a lie your brain tells you. You only actually experience tiny vignettes.

You imagine your experience of "orange" is this massive huge bandwidth cognitive experience, but you only really need a handful of neurons to maintain a weak signal signifying orange.

A crude drawing of an orange in an app can trigger exactly those same neurons. As long as your mind is busy with other things, you won't even notice the difference. This is why novels work. And it's why comics work. "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud does a great job of showing how abstract representations of things can provide richer experiences than realistic ones.

Of course, if you direct your attention to the differences between the crude drawing and a "real" orange, you can interrogate those differences. But the fact that you can explore a rich representation of an orange in your brain doesn't mean that you do when you experience one in daily use.

Re:Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up... by erkkie on Thursday March 30, 2017 @02:45AM (#13993439)
I want orange to appear on a google search, what bytes need to be sent over the wire from my brain.