How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero | Quanta Magazine
Yasemin Saplakogluquantamagazine.org
How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero | Quanta Magazine
Our brains are remarkably adept at learning new ways of thinking—and our neural connections are remarkably flexible, even into old age.
Maria Konnikova • Mastermind
Kaustubh Sule added
.fact .implementation
The first citation given concerns the “uniqueness problem,” which emphasizes a result long known by those of us who worked on IIT: that in systems that have mathematically perfectly symmetric interactions (the specifics are complicated, but just imagine this like a geometric shape), IIT gives conflicting answers as to the boundaries of the consciou... See more
Erik Hoel • Ambitious theories of consciousness are not "scientific misinformation"
Faith Hahn added
Over the past several years, Roger Penrose, a noted physicist and philosopher, has suggested that fine structures in the neurons called tubules perform an exotic form of computation called “quantum computing.” Quantum computing is computing using what are called “qu bits” which take on all possible combinations of solutions simultaneously. Just bec... See more
Ray Kurzweil • The Law of Accelerating Returns « the Kurzweil Library + collections
Juan Orbea added
The brain remains the single most sophisticated object in the known universe—by a staggering margin—even in an era of mobile devices, spacecraft, and particle accelerators. It outpaces our most powerful supercomputers, all within a volume measured in cubic inches, powered by nothing more than a fraction of the calories we consume each day. The stor
... See moreFei-Fei Li • The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI
Zero is present in every number, hidden, a consummate companion and partner. 1 is always 1, never 2 nor 5; and 1,000,000, large as it is, can only ever be 1,000,000. However, 0 can be anything and everything. Zero is Nothingness, the muse of artists and poets, the fertile vision of mystics. All poems are odes to zero; all paintings and sculptures a
... See moreAndre Doshim Halaw • God Is Nothingness
Atmos Black added
Grammar rules are just one example of a particular talent in our brain: the ability to discover the general laws that lie behind specific cases. Whether it is in mathematics, language, science, or music, the human brain manages to extract very abstract principles, systematic rules that it can reapply in many different contexts. Take arithmetic, for
... See moreStanislas Dehaene • How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now
On the contrary, mathematics molds itself into a preexisting, innate representation of numerical quantities, which it then extends and refines.
Stanislas Dehaene • How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now
A more controversial application than this scanning-the-brain-to-understand-it scenario is scanning-the-brain-to-download-it. When an entire network of neurons receives input (from the outside world or from other networks of neurons), the signaling amongst them appears at first to be frenzied and random. So the question addressed by the San Diego r... See more
Ray Kurzweil • The Law of Accelerating Returns « the Kurzweil Library + collections
Juan Orbea added