A neuron-chain illusion

from neuron-chain thinking

One thing that often bugs me: if i m not able to understand the things i have little knowledge of,obviously not being able to learn instantly (take technical context as example),

could I still communicate with people with different contexts? meaning you are able to let people get your question and you also know what you gotta ask next. i think this is incredibly fascinating–how do we understand how we understand? Obviously there are so many languages, massive amount of tech terms… i really DONT understand.

So, how could i… communicate? The thing is, maybe communication is NOT for “an answer” but for buidling a neuron-chain (i stole this concept from Prof Dean Buonomano) . In case you are not asking choosing bread or pancake for breakfast kindof questions.

I think an effective communication is as simple as you get some feedback from people you want to ask, ANYTHING they response according to your asking. That’s probably how the neurons compute and output, how the neurons communicate. (neuros are the computational elements of the brain)

Neuron-chain is not a linear narrative of what’s happening, since every feedback contains certain concepts or key words that you could abstract and link. But the tricky also fun part is, how to make it into a chain, consciously. According to Elon Musk, our brain is not mean to memorize most things, but to find the correlations (much like a strong sense of recognizing two completely irrelevant things relevant)

i assume that every question we ask reflects the REAL question from our deep mind, super tough to get it clear but gradually we get closer to it.

Why curious in Time?

The thinking above is ALSO baked from a speech and a book behind it I am reading recently——《Your Brain is a Time machine》by Prof Dean Buonomano. To me it opens up 1) a subject which i thought my focuses comfortably belong to 2) some concrete questions i cannot express myself.

it seems that “Time” is a concept challenging science for a long time, we can easily see it as a permanent topic in science (among many subjects like math, physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, neuroscience, complex systems … with different contexts).

the speech

Why m curious in time? it’s useless in terms of practical purposes just like i wrote in Usefulness of the useless knowledge, in short term middle term it is “useless”. But it will unlock some important and interesting discoveries towards questions unanswered (and of course lead to “practical” solutions afterwards) . 

But interestingly it’s also the “impractical” “useless” part make me ask/doubt: is this “useless” normal? why time is impractical? is it supposed to be the most scarcity, in a sense most “practical” clock that measures our life? If so why not? how do we measure time now? …

it’s interesting when i heard Prof Dean Buonomano describe neuroscience as “the only field that things being studied is also doing the studying”, i feel i found my “science” lol.

neuroscience is a very unique field, is the only field that the things being studied is also doing the studying. ——Speech 42’17 And it might distinguish from physics in interpreting time with an extra engagement of subjective sense, which can not always be calculated but be conceptualized or in metaphor.

The question is, whether our subjective sense of time– as an empirical observation of the universe explained by physics OR the illusion in the deepest sense of the world that has to be explained by neuroscience?——Speech 47’ So we can imagine it will lead to very different contexts towards seemingly “same question”, and thus different research approaches. But if you ask me to give only ONE reason why interested in “time” question, i think this one you also feel resonated: 

Why our time cannot be treated as WHAT IT IS?

I mean, as we all feel how our time is spent, how we make efforts, how our life is involved in time, every one is authentic to ourselves from the very inner heart and we are not “lazy”. So what’s the problem here? why we seem like being stuck by some “barrier” in between? is there possibilities we can measure time better? (if cannot remove this weird barrier thing, can we think from 1st principles to make something better?)

“The point is, clock time can be seen as a convention by which we standardize change. Time provides an incredibly useful way to establish equivalent relationships between the rate of change of different physical systems (adherents of this view are sometimes referred to as relationalists).”—《Your brain is a time machine》 P237 One of the Short findings for this question is that Bitcoin is here to stay (again not for the practical purposes here), stay stay stay. But to a further finding still needs more understanding of it. Though it seems like a man-made thing, it does have strong hints that directly point to how our brain tells time, then unlock more interesting topics like neuron mining (i made this up), collective intelligence and maybe we could make it real. (According to this i will write a relatively longer piece to describe,if cannot wait can read this.)

Well it’s enough for today’s illusion lol, if you feel anything i wrote interesting to you, that’s our neuron chatting ;) cheers!