[amthewiz]

> brain scans of subjects under these conditions find anything interesting

It is certainly possible, but currently not practical. Imaging technologies have limited spatiotemporal resolutions and coverage areas. Direct electrode reading are too intrusive, and so on. There is limited understanding of which brain areas might contribute to certain complex behavior so we might have to measure entire brain's activity. We don't know what resolution is useful - each spike or firing frequency or only dynamics (changes), etc. If we assume the availability of whole brain scan at spike resolution over extended time periods, theoretically a regression type algorithm could figure out relationship between brain activity and behavior. Firmly out of currently technology's reach though.

> definition/enumeration of self-awareness

Philosophers have been working on that for a long time. Some terms are well settled now, even though a term might cover a range of concepts. See that for "consciousness" here - https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/consciou.... This addresses mostly the western thought process and leaves out the eastern concepts. Most eastern concepts are too vague to pin down, though some are concrete enough to provide some insights (e.g. http://heavenmeetsearthyoga.com/news-features/the-meaning-of... matches reasonably well with modern understanding).

[mistermann]

Is this based on common sense or intuition, or are you actually familiar enough with the current state of the art AI to say for certain that we actually do need the level of precision you refer to to get anywhere? Of course, the higher the precision the better, but do you know we can't get anywhere without it?

[amthewiz]

Current state of the art precision has yielded insights at the sensory-motor (e.g. precise understanding of what sensory inputs cause what neural activity) and at subsystem level (e.g. what mental activity "uses" what brain subsystems). I am sure more can be done with existing technology, but a grand unified theory would probably need more precision. It is somewhat akin to attempts at finding the grand unified theory of Physics that works both at quantum and cosmological scales.

[mistermann]

I wonder if I did a poor job asking the question. What I'm getting at is, I wonder if common & reproducible brain patterns that might not formerly have been noticeable (perhaps due to a lack of precision when observing them in isolation) might reveal themselves when running assisted deep learning on a large number of subjects' results across a broad but "strictly defined" set of mental experiences that are known to produce "extreme psychological reactions". Might we discover associations (at the brain wave level) between experiences where our current understanding of the brain would not suggest there might be any? Would this type of analysis even need high precision?

Out of curiosity, was it you that downvoted my question? I'm struggling to understand what has changed on HN lately, where purely unopinionated and relevant questions are now very commonly downvoted. It's this type of thing that has caused my curiosity in this area, I'm interested in finding an underlying reason why people increasingly seem to be offended or disagree so strongly with things that only a few years ago were generally considered completely innocuous?

Perhaps it was the tone of the question? But again, I don't think that would have garnered any downvotes on HN 5 years ago - what's changed? Might we be able to detect something in brain activity that could lead us to some new paths to study to explain this widespread behavior?

Possibly related, but not necessarily:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting

https://www.quora.com/In-machine-learning-is-more-data-alway...