| I had this experience, except in psychology class decades ago. Phineas Gage had an accident: a steel rod was driven from his jaw to the top of his head, obliterating huge sections of his brain. And yet, it was a completely non-lethal attack. Despite losing significant brain matter, Phineas Gage immediately got up, was conscious and seemingly only lost eyesight in one eye. But Gage's personality, mental state, and other attributes were permanently changed. The early science of psychology (well... I dunno if you could call it "science" yet...) took Gage's accident and began to map out the physical mechanization of our minds. --------- Lobotomies and other such experiments would then map out which parts of the brain did what things. This was all figured out in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Cut this part of the brain out, the people can't talk anymore. Cut this part of the brain out, and you cannot transition short-term memory into medium term memory. Etc. etc. The fleshy parts of our brain are... fleshy... mundane, and machine like. Its a machine that remains mysterious in many ways, but its easily experimented upon and we can discover more and more from it. ----------- In any case, AI isn't much enlightening at all. AI isn't how human brains work anyway... no more than how an airplane wing is related to bird wings. If you want to discover and understand the human mind, with the human errors and human fallacies, you should study humans. Medical science, neurology. That being said: we don't actually think with our brains all the time. A lot of our emotional state comes from our blood, chemistry, lymph nodes and more. Overemphasis on the neural network will leave you blind to other psychological mechanisms. Our fingertips contain a substantial number of neurons, as our nervous system spreads throughout our body. The delineation of "brain" vs "spinal cord" vs "nerves" is very ambiguous, it flows. Honestly, a big problem with ourselves is that our Hollywood / Story understanding of ourselves and our own brains is complete bollocks. It would do you well to study psychology, at least the elementary levels, to understand yourself more. If you're worried about existentialism or trying to find an understanding of self, I don't think looking at machines or computers is very helpful. But maybe that's just me. In any case, please don't look to movies or stories. These are shared experiences, yes, but full of ancient 100+ year old psychology information that's largely been debunked by today's science. (Again: the first hundred years of psychology can barely be called a "science" or "art". It was more pseudo-science bullshit than real science. But you sometimes got good records of people like Phineas Gage and other forbidden experiments by today's ethical standards). |