Timewarp: How your brain creates the fourth dimension | Hacker News Reader

Timewarp: How your brain creates the fourth dimension

newscientist.com

29 pointscwan8 comments

Based on intuition, I think of the universe as a giant cellular automaton. Each state of the universe is a slice of time, which lasts a Planck length of time. Each slice is static, but the loaf of time-bread is dynamic as a hole. The brain is interesting in that it is capable of storing information from previous slices.

The brain, seeing at 13 fps according to TFA, relies on itself to interpolate the things that happen in between frames as well as combining the separate streams into what you perceive as vision.

I think the most interesting point the article made was that your brain operates a different frequencies. While this is not shocking, it does go to show that we can explain the functionality of our brains as a complicated computer system, and our bodies as a mechanical robot that happens to be squishy.

Now that we view ourselves as machines, perhaps we can apply more engineering practices for bodily upgrades. Anyone else want to be a cyborg as bad as I do?

I too want to be a cyborg, but I wonder when it'll come. One of the things I'm personally interested in (outside of the blue-sky stuff I read about in H+) is better interfaces for the already ubiquitous computers we have. I've been sketching up designs for Eyetap hardware that can be put into mass production and the software to back it, but I don't have the skill or money to make it happen, sadly. That such great technology exists but is solely in academia is just disappointing.

I've had this question since a child: if you have a strobe light, which flickers at the same frequency that your eyes capture information, will you see the light as on or off?

As usual, it's good to see that my questions weren't crazy (slash, stupid) like people thought.

@human_v2

Are you into transhumanism and AI research?

I'm interested in both. Though I couldn't tell you the tenets of transhumanism, the little I've read leads me to believe I would agree with it. AI, on the other hand, is something I'm very interested in. As a Singularitarian, I believe AI research is the only thing we should be working on. The faster we get AI done, the faster we solve many other problems.

Your questions aren't crazy these days. I've come to realize that nothing at all is impossible. I think people don't dream big enough anymore. Crazy dreams used to be "I want to be a rockstar" or something like that. I want to live forever and travel reality, like the guy in Star Trek: TNG, s1e07

I agree that AI is going to push us forward to places we've never even considered before (being a strong supporter of the Singularity myself), but I think focusing on AI is wrong. I think that, like most big things, strong AI will come by accident. Someone will be working on something orthogonal and they'll stumble upon the key to strong AI. Hopefully that'll happen sooner rather than later, as it's very important, I just don't think that sort of thing can be focused on in and of itself and succeed.

Your retinas are sensitive to light because light causes certain molecules (rhodopsin, I think) to change form and release energy. This chemical energy builds up in your photoreceptive cells and is then released as a neural signal. In other words, you would just see the light dimly, same as if the strobe were going really fast. What's interesting is if it's going a little slower than the fastest your eye can make out - the light seems to turn on and off slowly as the strobe and your eye go in and out of phase.

Thank you.

If this research is right about the brain's time processing, it would help explain déjà vu.

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