jcynix

From the original article:

"The extensive training required to achieve domain-specific expertise modifies the brain. Changes in brain structure have been found in domains including music, athletics, and navigation. Training also alters brain activity."

As described in Edward Tenners classic book "Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences", 1996 (oldie but goldie)

I've seen people (non IT) do similar things (i.e. develop small applications) with Excel.

I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.

Hmm, that gives me an idea: dithering (of generally "mogrifying") my images might make them less palatable for those pesky AIs roaming my web server …

How about Cormac McCarthy?

StreetComplete is cool, fun and useful, yes. And there is its companion app StreetMeasure which makes it easy to add measurements like the width of a narrow street, for example.

Fascinating! Now I need to check if there are "dog resitant" examples, because our juvenile Border Collie surely will shred most materials rather fast …

I can sympathise with you, but how could a "quantum" effect" doesn't make this easier?

Maybe "Turing machine" is too abstract or simplistic as a concept? Both for real computers and brains?

I can see that a computer is on some level just a lot of sand (silica and metal) but put together in a really complex way, it "suddenly" can add and compare numbers … if we observe the complexity levels from sand to computer and try to see the analogy when comparing cells / neurons to a structure of billions of them somehow interconnected on both a physical and chemical level, evolved during millions of years, I have no problem to accept that brains are still too complex to explain for us.

Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains.

Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "sub-processes" (or agents as Minsky calls them) of my mind try to get attention.

Daniel Dennett similarly gives a distributed model of consciousness. Where many parallel "processes" are at work, competing and "observing" each other. And this parallelism is happening with a much, much higher degree than any of our computers parallelism.

> Currently reading a web novel called The Years of Apocalypse.

Thanks for mentioning it. I'm now at Chapter 7 of it and it seems to be a well written story. Still need to arrive at the "time loop" moment ...

> Your coffee mug isn't naturally brown and warm: it is a cloud of atoms made of 99.9999% empty space, with no color, no texture, and no intrinsic smell.

A tiger too is "just a cloud of atoms" but nevertheless I wouldn't like to share a room with it. The article sounds a bit like a variant of Solipsism.

Hmm, the review makes me rather curious. While in the movies "Groundhog Day" and "12:01 P.M." the protagonists awake at the same place and time each day.

How do these book explain that the protagonist(s) can relocate to different places? Even if it would give a rationale for that glitch in the loop, it would be strange if you'd check into a hotel and appear to be there the next morning without the check-in?