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Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

This is a provocative experiment, both in terms of the results and certain elements of the employed experimental techniques.

What I found particularly interesting is that it elicits a consideration of what is memory. Is the association of stimulus-response a 'memory'? (Where does that leave 'instinct'?)

One could argue that the experiment has created an artificial 'instinct' and not 'memory' given that there was no 'experience'. If one were to counter that the invasive (modifying) preparatory steps of the experiment are "the experience", then we have discarded the 'body' entirely and are in the realm of brains in vat conception of 'consciousness', since we are asserting that direct manipulation of brain is functionally equivalent to 'phenomena' as experienced through the mediation of the body, the sensory apparatus, and the nervous system.

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It is obvious and well known that phenomena happen in the outisde world, but experience happens in the brain - Perception, usually mediated through Sensing. But when I remember seeing a friend in a dream, that is a real memory of a real experience, but there was no phenomenon in the world outside my head that caused the experience.

At the current level of understanding, it is pretty clear that if we could send the correct signals we control on the optic nerve, we would be causing the brain to have an experience to the same extent that the retina does. I don't think we know enough yet to go further than the optic nerve and say that we could induce a signal 'after' the optic nerve and produce the exact same effect,but that is still plausible. The next level of manipulation would be to induce signals into the brain as if they are coming from the visual processing area without directly stimulating the visual processing center at all - this is far further into the future, if it is even possible.

> The next level of manipulation would be to induce signals into the brain as if they are coming from the visual processing area without directly stimulating the visual processing center at all - this is far further into the future, if it is even possible.

There's a new wave of interesting work regarding inducing patterns of activity in the cortex using spatially precise two-photon excitation methods (two-photon holography). This paper does a relatively good job in controlling for the behavior of the animals in the study and shows that recalling patterns of activity can reliably reproduce a learned behavior based on the pattern of activity (and also probes at some aspects of general computations in the cortex): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6711485/

you can't have a memory of something that hasn't stimulated you in some way.

You don't remember the faces of all the people you meet on the way to work, even though they usually are the same people everyday.

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