🚀 go-pugleaf

I am planning to back up the original thread here, but not replies 
unless I answered them. Soe new material I would add. Eventually it 
will all be reshuffled, organized and published as a complpete book. 
It was all published in the sci.skeptic group.

Date: 7 Aug 2004 03:12:30 -0700
Local: Sat, Aug 7 2004 5:12 am

The Ghost In The Machine <e...@aurigae.athghost7038suus.net> wrote in 
message <news:mp57u1-j15.ln1@lexi2.athghost7038suus.net>...
(snip)
> There's also the little issue of power: the human brain
> is reputed (and AFAICT it's a good estimate) to use 19%
> of the 125W or so of a healthy adult young male's power.
> (The value is more normally expressed in the units
> 'kilocalories/day':
> (125 Watts) / (1 (kcal / day)) = 2 581.26195
> )
> 19% * 125W = 23.75W.


The signal must be very weak, though a trained brain, i.e., a brain
using the `unused` capacity should be able to generate stronger
signals. But even the weakest signal, in a totally continuous Reality
(infinite within) can be distinguished from the rest of the signals
(noise), given enough computing power. So power is not an issue,
though propagation certainly takes time; in a sense no signal is ever
lost, only becomes infinitely weak as time passes.
> This wouldn't be too hard to detect were it broadcast
> in a standard carrier wave from a considerable distance
> (with a conventional dish antenna), but it's far from
> clear how the human brain could receive such a signal.

I envision something akin to the magnetization of iron by a strong
magnetic field, though I am interested in the computing power needed
vs the strength of the signal.
> The brain is also not a particularly organized transmitter;
> one can contemplate a human brain as consisting as a large
> number of minute spark gaps.

Those sparks are actually spread at least in two dimensions; I
_assume_ they would radiate like `ripples` in the surrounding
electromagnetic field, much like sound does, though I am not an 
expert
in this kind of phenomena.
> It is barely possible to contemplate a pair of "tuned
> brains" right next to each other sharing a thought, but
> that's about as far as telepathy can go; the brain cell
> that has the right frequency to broadcast "Aaah, pizza's
> coming" in brain 1 might be received by brain 2 as "Oh oh,
> my foot's being invaded by space aliens" for all I know.

Except there is a point in common which is language...
> (And that's assuming a single brain cell is responsible
> for that thought; my guess is that the thought "Aaah,
> pizza's coming" involves the synchronized firing in a
> certain sequence of various neurons

The signal is certainly temporal, a series of activation patterns
`radiating` outwards toward infinity (?), or modifying by their 
simple
existence the whole state-of-the-world of the electromagnetic fields
surrounding us...
>including those in
> the smell/taste region of the brain, the thought that the
> delivery man came up in a truck (hearing), and perhaps
> the logo and/or general shape of the pizza (visual).
> With that hypothesis the receiver's firing pattern will be
> hopelessly scrambled; the rest of the brain will probably
> discard the signal as random noise.)

Even though specialized sensory brain centers may be involved in one
thought we can at least assume there is a common mapping among
individuals when it comes to language so that is the only part of the
signal we need to take into account, and very likely the structure of
the activations for any word or phrase should be roughly similar from
brain to brain; if this is true we would transmit and _receive_
thoughts only in the language or languages we actually practice, and
both the beginning and ending of the signals would be blurred until
there is a match between the pattern of the signal received and the
set of neurones trained to distingush the signal. Since spoken
language is composed of characteristic sounds, some words would be
easily transmited and received, while others would be hardly
distinguished. I suppose a trained brain would develop resonator and
amplifier clusters whith activation paterns deepening with practice,
specialized in `tuning` basic (phoneme? morpheme?) patterns before
sending them to the `language understanding` centers. I imagine these
centers analogically, like kind of key-keyhole pairs.

But this is going too far already. The issue is whether a brain can
dedicate and does have the computing power in terms of activations to
process the signals given that they must be very weak.

Fabrizio J Bonsignore now Danilo J Bonsignore