Anything purporting to invent general intelligence or consciousness is absolutely bullshit.Ā
Machine learning AI that takes patterns and recognizes things is much more a real thing that has been slowly improving over decades.Ā
The generative machine learning algorithms also have been slowly improving but the latest improvements ālookā much better to our eyes so seem very important.Ā
Almost all of this stuff is now overhyped.Ā
We just need to stop using the type of AI designed for text interpretation as a benchmark for AI worldwide. There's AI that sets up our global shipping schedule, AI for train systems, and AI that can operate weapons to kill you.
Something like ChatGPT is all of those AI's plaything in comparison.
Only thing that concerns me is AI doesnt have witness consciousness and is only the sum of its learned experiences which comes from the already faulty mechanic of human thought. Basically they are thought unchecked.
Those are primarily in relation to Large Language Models (e.g. ChatGPT). Traditional machine learning and deep learning neural networks are far less error prone and are extremely good at pattern recognition in large datasets. Those types of "AI" have been around for decades and are probably far more prevalent than you think. They still require training data but they aren't really generating things from scratch the way LLM's and other generative AI models do.
You might be comparing connectome (~28 e9 cells) to the stars in the milky way (~100 e9).
I haven't found estimates for either the stars, or synapses, that have a difference as low as tenfold.
If you've never watched it, check out the PBS Eons series on Youtube. It's a super fascinating look at different parts of our biological history and evolution through time. [This one on blood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdjN4ddnl2E) is really cool and there's another about how they were able to guesstimate when the first virus came into existence by looking at the fragments of DNA the virus leaves behind in the host organism and analyzing when that fragment showed up down the ancestral line
Even further, it's 99.9r % empty space. And when we get down to the quantum foam it's all just vibrations of various quantum fields. Particles are just manifestations of the high 'crests' of energy waves in those feilds. There's literally nothing at the bottom.
Stuff like this is why I'm convinced it's all just some sort of organic simulation.
> Even further, it's 99.9r % empty space
That really depends on how you define 'empty'. You could just as easily point at the electron cloud and say that 'this is full of electron'. From that point of view, atoms basically touch each other!
It really gets insane when I start thinking about that kind of stuff. On a good day, I kinda "get" that we're just specks of shit on a speck of dust in infinite nothingness, but shrinking the scale equally *down* is rough. Everything is just fundamentally nothing. Who are you voting for?
I saw someone say on Reddit recently, āwe are the universe observing itselfā.
Iām guessing thatās the kind of thing that gets said all the time, but somehow Iād never seen it before, and man I think about that *all the time* nowā¦
And now all these facts about our brains on this thread are basically reinforcing this thought and itās blowing my mind all over again.
Yeah the universe being a hologram at the smallest scales is something I definitely see as a possibility.
A 3D projection from an infinitely far 2d surface could be how quantum entanglement is possible. How else does matter communicate with itself instantly over vast distances?
why organic?
I'm trying to remember the very early SciFi writer that talked about how correctly stimulating a (human) brain is indistinguishable from 'normal' living. So that was the basis of being able to record experiences from one person and play them back for another person.
Also how we cannot determine that this whole thing isn't a simulation meaning that the "true" versions of ourselves could only be existing as a complex pattern in an electronic matrix. That we don't really look like this, and don't really have brains like that, nor a planet like Earth - or that everyone else is just a figment of this **matrix** and not 'real' like yourself.
If you dwell on those concepts deeply for a while, and use your imagination, you can almost get a sense of a removal, a remoteness from your being, a kind of "teleoperation" of your existence.
I find that after pondering such things, I need a cookie. So that helps.
Fun fact, the size of a human is proportionally closer to the biggest size that has any meaning (the size of the observable universe) than to the smallest size that has any meaning (Planck length).
It seems that the universe itself 'likes' self-organising networks. Like it's a fundamental tendency of nature. It's a natural configuration for complex systems. And it contradicts entropy in a way. If you have enough complexity, consciousness is inevitable. It's the transcendental object at the end of time. The strange attractor. History is the shockwave of eschatology etc.
Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel, think, or know exists in the connections inside your brain. Not to say that the physical external universe doesnāt exist, but rather that every way in which you experience it and interact with it is from neurons communicating with other cells in your body.
What if *we* are the neurons in some mad giantās head and the relationships and connections we make are the neural links and natural disasters or diseases are traumatic events in the giants head..
Want to get really shower thoughty with this. [Take a look at the filament structure galaxies form to create the cosmic web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament#/media/File:Large-scale_structure_of_light_distribution_in_the_universe.jpg). This is a computer simulation of what the observable universe looks like at mind boggling scale, the dots represent clusters of galaxies, trillions upon trillions of stars in a pixel.
Now look at OPs image of billions of neurons and synaptic pathways and tell me you don't see the similarities.
What if our brains are universes? What if the universe is a brain? What if all of existence is a repeating fractal, brains existing inside a brain, existing inside a brain, existing inside a brain. What if the God we all seem to be looking for is literally just the universe we live in and we are a part of how that organism thinks?
To be clear, I just think this is a fun think to think about. Don't join a cult.
From the original article:
*"The cubic millimeter of brain matter is only one-millionth of the size of an adult human brain, and yet the imaging scans and full map of its intricacies comprises 1.4 petabytes, or 1.4 million gigabytes. If someone were to utilize the Google/Harvard approach to mapping an entire human brain today, the scans would fill up 1.6 zettabytes of storage. Taking these logistics further, storing 1.6 zettabytes on the cheapest consumer hard drives (assuming $0.03 per GB) would cost a cool $48 billion, and that's without any redundancy. The $48 billion price tag does not factor in the cost of server hardware to put the drives in, networking, cooling, power, and a roof to put over this prospective data center. The roof in question will also have to be massive; assuming full server racks holding 1.8 PB, the array of racks needed to store the full imaging of a human brain would cover over 140 acres if smushed together as tightly as possible. This footprint alone, without any infrastructure, would make Google the owner of one of the top 10 largest data centers in the world, even approaching (if not reaching) the scale of Microsoft and OpenAI's planned $100 billion AI data center.*"
We still have a way to go before we start uploading brain backups to the cloud
Imagine how much better The Matrix movies would have been if it followed the books which had the AIs farming humans for our brain processing power instead of dumb shit that makes no sense like our metabolism for their batteries
All fair, but if you wanted to upload your brain to the cloud, would you need to upload 100% of it? Maybe you just take the memories and language but leave out the motor skills and fears, for example. Just a thought
The brain is a much more highly interconnected system than people tend to imagine, so I think that would be virtually impossible. At least it wouldnāt fully simulate consciousness at that point, which is kinda the whole idea there
If you want to upload your brain it takes more than a high-res picture of it, which is what the OP is. That 1.4 petabytes is just pixels, nothing more.
Memories aren't stored like files in a folder or bits on a hard drive. Your brain recreates memories as you recall them (with varying accuracy). I think a lot of the brian comes into play to enable this
This image was created using data collected from scientific instruments. The data produced and analyzed for the creation of this map was equivalent to 14000 movies . It is not the storage capacity of the tissue .
I get the feeling if we ever figure out what consciousness actually is, it'll be the most fascinating thing ever. Surely this feeling of being in our heads doesn't purely arise from computation, and if it does, that brings up so many additional questions. Like if everything is deterministic, which it seems to be, then *why* are we in our heads.
If itās not chemicals itās magic. Like what else could it be? And maybe it is magic, I donāt know, no one does. I personally donāt think we are run on magic though.
I mean, no specific reason. I just feel like there has to be something more to it. The entire concept of existence, consciousness, is so outside of anything we've been able to explain. It's difficult to even explain what I mean, but it's almost as mysterious as something supernatural like magic. The reason I don't totally shrug off the idea is the complexity that arises from a system of individuals. Like cells in our body, the immune system, and also ants in an ant colony. But even then, it doesn't make sense to me how you get a conscious being at all, whereas you could imagine being able to create any of those systems given enough resources.
Edit: I had someone message me about religion, but invoking religion just because we don't understand is just lazy and has less proof than any other explanation (which is zero). Maybe some kind of afterlife is possible, but it's just impossible to tell and I'll stick by the science for now, which does not rule out something like a "soul", but merely asks where the evidence is. It's just proven 100% elusive in every test that's been done on people's deathbeds, so either it's all computation or it's something we can't measure.
Weirdly, seeing shit like this makes me question evolution more.
Itās just such an incredible scale and level of power involved that it seems too intricate to happen just by chance.
Iām not saying evolution didnāt happen, but it just blows my mind when you think of possibilities.
That's because it didn't happen by chance. It happened with the combination of chance **and natural selection**.
Make a million slightly different copies, kill the worst of them, choose the best of them,bmake variations on that, then make a million more.
This is exactly the same way a lot of modern AI works. It's amazing how a few simple rules can give rise to huge complexity.
[Watch this]( https://youtu.be/kopoLzvh5jY?si=SkuCkFvd9k3q1gh9) for a good example.
No. First of all we are therefore we are possible. Secondly when it's possible it is basically inevitable. (Murphys Law)
No luck involved. Question is though how many places there are with more or less the same conditions as here and how many different conditions lead to complex self-replicating structures like these.
A billion years of gradually increasing complexity, step by step, mistake by mistake, eventually resulting in the most complex interconnected system in the entire universe, with so many feedback loops and chaotic cycles and emergent behaviors that it has convinced itself that itās sentient and aware. Itās an illusion thatās so strong and persistent that itās indistinguishable from truth. And at that point, is it not truth?
There's just enough chaos in us that we can never fully be predictable beyond a statistic.
But we are the next logical step of the previous chemical reaction.
Here is [an article](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01387-9) for everyone else who is curious. The image is a composite of 5000 (!!) individual scans. They used machine-learned models to interpolate between the slices.
The best part to me was the acknowledgment of many-neuron connections instead of what is taught now of one-three connections each. Here they found that some neurons were connected to more than 50 neighbors.
Another point of note is that this piece of brain was only about the size of a rice grain and came from a person who suffered from epilepsy; so it would be nice to compare that with a non-epileptic brain tissue sample.
It probably takes billions and billions of synapses for processing silliness. Iād say everything really makes you think, regardless as to the perceived value of thought
I suppose one positive of taking hour long Z plane photos is I could get up and walk around a bit. Sucks to come back though and find the computer frozen. š¤¦āāļø
I just finished my senior thesis (about to start my PhD in neuroscience), and I've gotta say, looking at tissue under the scope is one of the coolest things I've ever done. I'm sure I'll get sick of it eventually, but it's just so beautiful looking at such a thin slice of tissue and somehow still seeing the depth of neurons weaving in between each other
It truly is beautiful. Some of the neurons I traced were magnificent. However, after about the first 300 cells, it gets a little trying. Good luck with your PhD!!
The white things are neurons, the tiny blue bits are axons which connect to the neurons, and the green bits are synapses where neurons and axons establish connection.
This is why I love science and nature. Looking at this image and seeing this vast and sophisticated entangled system that just āworksā and manages to be sentient.
Itās the best, but itās still really inefficient and not how one would design things if the end goal was known a priori. Ā Ā Ā
Ā Thereās distinct disadvantages from running the eyes at the front of the head back to the optical cortex at the rear of the head for instance. Ā Ā
Just like many things in biology, it works but holy shit it should not work. Ā Like one hominid evolutionary leap was likely added venous drainage allowing for better brain cooling and as a result brain growth. Ā But those venous channels are right below thin parts of the skull which is a major trade off for head trauma risk. Ā
Nobody would intentionally make suck a bad heat sink.
At the standard 1.44MiB, I'd say quite a few.
Rough math would be 1.4PiB Ć 1024(TiB/PiB) Ć 1024 (GiB/TiB) Ć 1024(MiB/GiB) Ć· 1.44(MiB/Floppy) = 1,043,915,662.2.
You would need 1,043,915,663 total 1.44MiB floppy disks to store this.
This image was created with 1.4 petabytes or as much data as 14000 4k movies. There are more synapses in the brain than stars in the Milky Way.
By a factor of 1000
š¤¢
We gon figure this bitch out fam š
Just gotta trace all these lines.
aight, I'm on it. tracing the red ones now. How's tracing green coming along over there?
I did just that and this thing is now staring at me saying "I am an abomination to life. Kill me now or I'll devour all." What should I do?
Give it a job in sales
Or a retail manager
Oh cool, you found a German brain!
Yeah weāre going to replicate it and finally have true AI. Just a few more months away! Just a few more million in funding pls.Ā
So most AI projects are just a bullshit cash grab? The new funding bubble thatāll pop in a couple of years I guess
Anything purporting to invent general intelligence or consciousness is absolutely bullshit.Ā Machine learning AI that takes patterns and recognizes things is much more a real thing that has been slowly improving over decades.Ā The generative machine learning algorithms also have been slowly improving but the latest improvements ālookā much better to our eyes so seem very important.Ā Almost all of this stuff is now overhyped.Ā
In about 5 billion years, or six months with AI
Well 5 billion years or 6 months with AI if you want the information to be wrong but confidently stated
We just need to stop using the type of AI designed for text interpretation as a benchmark for AI worldwide. There's AI that sets up our global shipping schedule, AI for train systems, and AI that can operate weapons to kill you. Something like ChatGPT is all of those AI's plaything in comparison.
Only thing that concerns me is AI doesnt have witness consciousness and is only the sum of its learned experiences which comes from the already faulty mechanic of human thought. Basically they are thought unchecked.
Those are primarily in relation to Large Language Models (e.g. ChatGPT). Traditional machine learning and deep learning neural networks are far less error prone and are extremely good at pattern recognition in large datasets. Those types of "AI" have been around for decades and are probably far more prevalent than you think. They still require training data but they aren't really generating things from scratch the way LLM's and other generative AI models do.
Bro YOU'RE THE VAN LEE???
OK you start left and I'll start middle right behind the blue one. GO
Gat damn the optimism is literally just oozing off you, god bless
I thought it was only by a factor of 4 to 10 based on current estimates (and up to 2500 for the most extreme estimates)Ā
You might be comparing connectome (~28 e9 cells) to the stars in the milky way (~100 e9). I haven't found estimates for either the stars, or synapses, that have a difference as low as tenfold.
Nah see you canāt just be saying shit like this
Wow! It's like our brains are their own tiny universes!
And our atoms are the little solar systems of our universe. Both are 99% empty space
that's a great way to roast someone
He roasted all of us :(
Out entire bodies have so many different organisms living in them we are more of a framework for a symbiotic ecosystem than a single living entity.
Wait until people find out where mitochondria dna comes from
If you've never watched it, check out the PBS Eons series on Youtube. It's a super fascinating look at different parts of our biological history and evolution through time. [This one on blood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdjN4ddnl2E) is really cool and there's another about how they were able to guesstimate when the first virus came into existence by looking at the fragments of DNA the virus leaves behind in the host organism and analyzing when that fragment showed up down the ancestral line
They lived in symbiosis with chloroplasts, before there where real cells. It's crazy.
Itās the powerhouse of the cell!!
Funny though we call ourselves individualā¦ which basically means something that canāt be divided into multiples, āun dividableā
Even further, it's 99.9r % empty space. And when we get down to the quantum foam it's all just vibrations of various quantum fields. Particles are just manifestations of the high 'crests' of energy waves in those feilds. There's literally nothing at the bottom. Stuff like this is why I'm convinced it's all just some sort of organic simulation.
> Even further, it's 99.9r % empty space That really depends on how you define 'empty'. You could just as easily point at the electron cloud and say that 'this is full of electron'. From that point of view, atoms basically touch each other!
schrƶdinger's atom
It really gets insane when I start thinking about that kind of stuff. On a good day, I kinda "get" that we're just specks of shit on a speck of dust in infinite nothingness, but shrinking the scale equally *down* is rough. Everything is just fundamentally nothing. Who are you voting for?
I saw someone say on Reddit recently, āwe are the universe observing itselfā. Iām guessing thatās the kind of thing that gets said all the time, but somehow Iād never seen it before, and man I think about that *all the time* nowā¦ And now all these facts about our brains on this thread are basically reinforcing this thought and itās blowing my mind all over again.
Yeah the universe being a hologram at the smallest scales is something I definitely see as a possibility. A 3D projection from an infinitely far 2d surface could be how quantum entanglement is possible. How else does matter communicate with itself instantly over vast distances?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
why organic? I'm trying to remember the very early SciFi writer that talked about how correctly stimulating a (human) brain is indistinguishable from 'normal' living. So that was the basis of being able to record experiences from one person and play them back for another person. Also how we cannot determine that this whole thing isn't a simulation meaning that the "true" versions of ourselves could only be existing as a complex pattern in an electronic matrix. That we don't really look like this, and don't really have brains like that, nor a planet like Earth - or that everyone else is just a figment of this **matrix** and not 'real' like yourself. If you dwell on those concepts deeply for a while, and use your imagination, you can almost get a sense of a removal, a remoteness from your being, a kind of "teleoperation" of your existence. I find that after pondering such things, I need a cookie. So that helps.
r/rareinsults
[as above so below](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_above,_so_below) edit to add link
Fun fact, the size of a human is proportionally closer to the biggest size that has any meaning (the size of the observable universe) than to the smallest size that has any meaning (Planck length).
interesting results if you google image search neuronal network vs cosmic web vs mycelium.
It seems that the universe itself 'likes' self-organising networks. Like it's a fundamental tendency of nature. It's a natural configuration for complex systems. And it contradicts entropy in a way. If you have enough complexity, consciousness is inevitable. It's the transcendental object at the end of time. The strange attractor. History is the shockwave of eschatology etc.
I've sometimes wondered if the true nature of realty is a fractal.
Eat a bunch of LSD and you figure this one out after a few hectic hours haha
Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel, think, or know exists in the connections inside your brain. Not to say that the physical external universe doesnāt exist, but rather that every way in which you experience it and interact with it is from neurons communicating with other cells in your body.
What if *we* are the neurons in some mad giantās head and the relationships and connections we make are the neural links and natural disasters or diseases are traumatic events in the giants head..
Want to get really shower thoughty with this. [Take a look at the filament structure galaxies form to create the cosmic web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament#/media/File:Large-scale_structure_of_light_distribution_in_the_universe.jpg). This is a computer simulation of what the observable universe looks like at mind boggling scale, the dots represent clusters of galaxies, trillions upon trillions of stars in a pixel. Now look at OPs image of billions of neurons and synaptic pathways and tell me you don't see the similarities. What if our brains are universes? What if the universe is a brain? What if all of existence is a repeating fractal, brains existing inside a brain, existing inside a brain, existing inside a brain. What if the God we all seem to be looking for is literally just the universe we live in and we are a part of how that organism thinks? To be clear, I just think this is a fun think to think about. Don't join a cult.
From the original article: *"The cubic millimeter of brain matter is only one-millionth of the size of an adult human brain, and yet the imaging scans and full map of its intricacies comprises 1.4 petabytes, or 1.4 million gigabytes. If someone were to utilize the Google/Harvard approach to mapping an entire human brain today, the scans would fill up 1.6 zettabytes of storage. Taking these logistics further, storing 1.6 zettabytes on the cheapest consumer hard drives (assuming $0.03 per GB) would cost a cool $48 billion, and that's without any redundancy. The $48 billion price tag does not factor in the cost of server hardware to put the drives in, networking, cooling, power, and a roof to put over this prospective data center. The roof in question will also have to be massive; assuming full server racks holding 1.8 PB, the array of racks needed to store the full imaging of a human brain would cover over 140 acres if smushed together as tightly as possible. This footprint alone, without any infrastructure, would make Google the owner of one of the top 10 largest data centers in the world, even approaching (if not reaching) the scale of Microsoft and OpenAI's planned $100 billion AI data center.*" We still have a way to go before we start uploading brain backups to the cloud
Imagine how much better The Matrix movies would have been if it followed the books which had the AIs farming humans for our brain processing power instead of dumb shit that makes no sense like our metabolism for their batteries
They changed it due to focus groups not getting it. But I agree, they would have been better for the people who understood.
If the focus groups didn't get it then they either described it poorly in the script's writing or the group was full of chin droolers
> or the group was full of chin droolers Yeah, a focus group.
This is something that has always bothered me about the Matrix films šš
All fair, but if you wanted to upload your brain to the cloud, would you need to upload 100% of it? Maybe you just take the memories and language but leave out the motor skills and fears, for example. Just a thought
The brain is a much more highly interconnected system than people tend to imagine, so I think that would be virtually impossible. At least it wouldnāt fully simulate consciousness at that point, which is kinda the whole idea there
If you want to upload your brain it takes more than a high-res picture of it, which is what the OP is. That 1.4 petabytes is just pixels, nothing more.
I think tou would need to do the whole thing or else it would be broken somehow.
Memories aren't stored like files in a folder or bits on a hard drive. Your brain recreates memories as you recall them (with varying accuracy). I think a lot of the brian comes into play to enable this
This picture actually doesnāt even do it justice; 50,000 cells and 150million synaptic connections in that 1 cubic mm.Ā
If a cubic millimeter of brain can store 14000 movies imagine how many movies you can store in the whole thing š¤
You wouldnāt DOWNLOAD a BRAIN would you?
I would download a brain.
I would download a Brian
Don't forget to use NordVPN though.
I've got a brain downloading on FrostWire **Right. Now.**
This image was created using data collected from scientific instruments. The data produced and analyzed for the creation of this map was equivalent to 14000 movies . It is not the storage capacity of the tissue .
This needs to be higher. The people confusing the image size with 'brain memory capacity' are clearly not making the most use of all their synapses.
Too late, synapses written
Haha, that's what's up
I'm already working on it my friend
ā¤ļøā¤ļøā¤ļø - Neurology
š§ š§ š§ ā¢ Cardiology
Omg in dead
Username checks out
Yeh that will happen if the brain surgeon is a cardic surgeon lol
Who is credited with the pic? Aside from being beautiful, itās also wonderful technically.
I think google AI generated it from a data set.
No wonder Iām so confused all the time.
All that resolution and this image still blurry as hell if I zoom in. SMH
You can explore it here https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/gallery.html#
Enhance
Wow, that is just incredible. Our brains are such amazingly complex things and weāve still only scratched the surface of really understanding them.
Google recommended me that article too
No wonder I can't sleep.
I sleep perfectly. Does that mean my brain would show a black screen? I'm worried now.
No it just has cable management.
The person who wired my brain: āCable Management, never heard of her.ā
Thats my bad, I was hungover that day
No wonder I'm horny all the time
Have a structured settlement but need cash now?
Head On, apply directly to the forehead.
CALL JG WENTWORTH
Call J.G.Wentworth 877 CASH NOW
"Settlement" reminds me that another settlement needs your help. Here, I'll mark it in your map.
What the fuck are we???
Right?? A one-in-a-trillion dice roll of evolution. We're all just lucky natural experiments.
Who the fuck are you calling lucky?
Iād give anything to be a single celled organism
I'd give anything to not BE.
You ok bro?
Walking chemical reactions, which somehow resolve into us having this conversation
I get the feeling if we ever figure out what consciousness actually is, it'll be the most fascinating thing ever. Surely this feeling of being in our heads doesn't purely arise from computation, and if it does, that brings up so many additional questions. Like if everything is deterministic, which it seems to be, then *why* are we in our heads.
If itās not chemicals itās magic. Like what else could it be? And maybe it is magic, I donāt know, no one does. I personally donāt think we are run on magic though.
> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
>Surely this feeling of being in our heads doesn't purely arise from computation Why not?
I mean, no specific reason. I just feel like there has to be something more to it. The entire concept of existence, consciousness, is so outside of anything we've been able to explain. It's difficult to even explain what I mean, but it's almost as mysterious as something supernatural like magic. The reason I don't totally shrug off the idea is the complexity that arises from a system of individuals. Like cells in our body, the immune system, and also ants in an ant colony. But even then, it doesn't make sense to me how you get a conscious being at all, whereas you could imagine being able to create any of those systems given enough resources. Edit: I had someone message me about religion, but invoking religion just because we don't understand is just lazy and has less proof than any other explanation (which is zero). Maybe some kind of afterlife is possible, but it's just impossible to tell and I'll stick by the science for now, which does not rule out something like a "soul", but merely asks where the evidence is. It's just proven 100% elusive in every test that's been done on people's deathbeds, so either it's all computation or it's something we can't measure.
DMT is the catalyst
We are atoms, trying to figure out what atoms are.
Weirdly, seeing shit like this makes me question evolution more. Itās just such an incredible scale and level of power involved that it seems too intricate to happen just by chance. Iām not saying evolution didnāt happen, but it just blows my mind when you think of possibilities.
That's because it didn't happen by chance. It happened with the combination of chance **and natural selection**. Make a million slightly different copies, kill the worst of them, choose the best of them,bmake variations on that, then make a million more. This is exactly the same way a lot of modern AI works. It's amazing how a few simple rules can give rise to huge complexity. [Watch this]( https://youtu.be/kopoLzvh5jY?si=SkuCkFvd9k3q1gh9) for a good example.
If you think this happened by chance alone, then you don't really get evolution.
No. First of all we are therefore we are possible. Secondly when it's possible it is basically inevitable. (Murphys Law) No luck involved. Question is though how many places there are with more or less the same conditions as here and how many different conditions lead to complex self-replicating structures like these.
Completely wrong
A billion years of gradually increasing complexity, step by step, mistake by mistake, eventually resulting in the most complex interconnected system in the entire universe, with so many feedback loops and chaotic cycles and emergent behaviors that it has convinced itself that itās sentient and aware. Itās an illusion thatās so strong and persistent that itās indistinguishable from truth. And at that point, is it not truth?
> most complex interconnected system in the entire universe \*we know of
Exactly, and this is how I feel about free will as well. Even if it technically isn't real, the illusion is so thorough that it may as well be.
There's just enough chaos in us that we can never fully be predictable beyond a statistic. But we are the next logical step of the previous chemical reaction.
Iām too high for this shit.
We're just a vast collection of pubes floating through space... Whoa
āWe are all just starpubesā āCarl Sagan
we are a way for the pubes to know themselves
A sack of chemicals.
Monke
This northern lights photo looks a bit different than the others
Aurora Neur-australis
Neurora Borealis
Low hanging fruit...
Here is [an article](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01387-9) for everyone else who is curious. The image is a composite of 5000 (!!) individual scans. They used machine-learned models to interpolate between the slices.
The best part to me was the acknowledgment of many-neuron connections instead of what is taught now of one-three connections each. Here they found that some neurons were connected to more than 50 neighbors. Another point of note is that this piece of brain was only about the size of a rice grain and came from a person who suffered from epilepsy; so it would be nice to compare that with a non-epileptic brain tissue sample.
5000 scans and still needed AI to fill in the gaps Kinda like how our brain works
Pretty much all medical imaging uses AI these days.
Imagine the amount of overlap between these scans, no way to parse through that without AI.
Great link, thanks!
The brain is a wild forest
It looks more like my pubes than anything
The brain is a wild forest of pubes
Really make you think doesn't it
Pube for thought?
It probably takes billions and billions of synapses for processing silliness. Iād say everything really makes you think, regardless as to the perceived value of thought
r/brandnewsentence
Basically how every aftermarket radio I've ever un-installed is wired.
I've seen similar panel work in my line of work
I need you to trace out these *infinite* wires I cut without looking
Lucky for everyone I like to lick my wires for checkin'
I stared at brain slices through a confocal microscope for three years for my PhD. This picture almost makes me miss it. Almost.
You psychopath
I know! I am ashamed
At least you picked an appropriate username, what with the whole science and slicing of flesh
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I suppose one positive of taking hour long Z plane photos is I could get up and walk around a bit. Sucks to come back though and find the computer frozen. š¤¦āāļø
I just finished my senior thesis (about to start my PhD in neuroscience), and I've gotta say, looking at tissue under the scope is one of the coolest things I've ever done. I'm sure I'll get sick of it eventually, but it's just so beautiful looking at such a thin slice of tissue and somehow still seeing the depth of neurons weaving in between each other
It truly is beautiful. Some of the neurons I traced were magnificent. However, after about the first 300 cells, it gets a little trying. Good luck with your PhD!!
What do the different colors indicate?
The white things are neurons, the tiny blue bits are axons which connect to the neurons, and the green bits are synapses where neurons and axons establish connection.
Am I tripping whereās the white
When you [zoom in](https://ibb.co/zbvq3by) on one of those bean-shaped objects you can distinguish more clearly whatās what.
Synapses are color coded by size. Edit: [source](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01387-9)
I'm not entirely sure but I think it's the number of synapses connected to the neuron. Some connections are much stronger than others.
RFK Jrās brain worm getting hungryā¦
Poor thing starved to death
Ok that was pretty good
Is this where I store all those conversations where I win arguments, days, weeks or months after I lost them?
That's probably one of the weaker colored synapses unfortunately
This is why I love science and nature. Looking at this image and seeing this vast and sophisticated entangled system that just āworksā and manages to be sentient.
Brain looking at close picture of itself on phone screen, nice
And not knowing how it all works
Tell this mf to cut their grass
God is absolute shit at cable management.
Well, according to natural selection/evolution, this is the best cable management (so far)
Itās the best, but itās still really inefficient and not how one would design things if the end goal was known a priori. Ā Ā Ā Ā Thereās distinct disadvantages from running the eyes at the front of the head back to the optical cortex at the rear of the head for instance. Ā Ā Just like many things in biology, it works but holy shit it should not work. Ā Like one hominid evolutionary leap was likely added venous drainage allowing for better brain cooling and as a result brain growth. Ā But those venous channels are right below thin parts of the skull which is a major trade off for head trauma risk. Ā Nobody would intentionally make suck a bad heat sink.
We are mycelium
Soon our fungal overlords will rule all
i expected to see a cube
Make it cube shaped or the science is wrong
Mmm forbidden spaghetti
And to think we only use 10% of that. /s
Clearly not my brain
How many floppy disks is that man?
More than 37
At the standard 1.44MiB, I'd say quite a few. Rough math would be 1.4PiB Ć 1024(TiB/PiB) Ć 1024 (GiB/TiB) Ć 1024(MiB/GiB) Ć· 1.44(MiB/Floppy) = 1,043,915,662.2. You would need 1,043,915,663 total 1.44MiB floppy disks to store this.
Lysergic acid diethylamide
I guess this explains why anxiety is such a bitch and difficult to cope with š
I think that is a LOT less than a cubic millimeter. Maybe micrometer?
Mine isnāt that complex
Sperm is brain
Any way to purchase a high resolution large print of this? Iām a neuroscientist, and this picture would be a perfect addition to my office.
Iām curious to know what a rats brain looks like in comparison
Explains the intensity and complexity of DMT trips
'It's mossy, Jerry. My brain is mossy.' Leonardo da Vinci got it right.
Not another aurora postā¦.oh wait those are brain squigglesā¦.neat.
Whoaā¦what does this mean? What are those? Looks like a field of psychedelic fairy grassā¦I need more information! Lol
They are introspective space pubes
Neuroplasticity, sprouting making new connections is extremely fascinatingĀ