What is more mysterious?

[azatoth]

What say you WATMM? What is more mysterious in your opinion. Our brains or the universe where our brains are?

 

My choice is the brain. We have figured out some things about both, but I believe after all is said and done we'll be left with more questions about our brain and mind than the universe. Surely the thing we use to understand the universe is more stranger than the thing it's trying to understand?

 

General discussion about cool shit discovered and theorized about the universe and brain is encouraged.

[Guest Rambo]

Good thread. I think we will definitely have questions about the universe longer than we have questions about the brain!

[azatoth]

Hmmm, maybe the questions left about the brain are more of the philosophical kind than downright scientific. It's hard to imagine what we could learn about our mind if we would be able to model our brains cell by cell in a computer. But I also have a feeling we could scientifically be able to explain the universe in much greater detail than the brain sometime in the future.

[Guest Coalbucket PI]

As a biologist I feel I should say the brain but then I understand more about the brain than I do about the universe because I'm a biologist so in a sense the universe is more mysterious to me but I know more about the brain because I found it mysterious to begin with so I don't know.

 

I think there are physical barriers that keep the universe hard to know anything about with too much confidence, I suppose there is (probably) always going to be the problem of scale in that humans are only so big and only live so long and things can only move so fast, how can you ever really see the big picture and fully understand it when there are such huge hurdles of distance and time in both directions? At least you can observe a brain from start to finish, you can see some earlier examples of where it might have come from, you can cut it to bits and poke it and run electricity through it. Although the fact is this has been done for centuries and hasn't solved a lot. The problem is about systems level understanding, but getting useful data about the whole system is elusive; it's experimental techniques that are lacking though rather than insurmountably huge times and distances.

 

There is another issue about the level of understanding we are talking about. It's hard to compare but I think if you consider the sort of questions we are asking about the brain to those being asked about the universe they are on different scales. The universe questions are more fundamental, like why is it even there and doing what its doing, and where is it? We know where brains are and why they exist, and we know what they do, we just can't figure out how they are doing a lot of it. When you look at it that way the brain doesn't seem nearly as mysterious as the universe.

[Redruth]

.

i would say that there is something greater then both the brain and the universe that we have yet to fully understand, but given the choices i will choose the universe

.

[Guest Ranky Redlof]

brain

weird unexplainable shit happening to it all the time (drugs ftw)

the universe just is there doing what it does, altho the thought that in an infinite universe a copy of me is currently fucking Scarlett Johansson backwards in the pussy is also fun.

[GORDO]

the universe, I don't think it will be long until we begin to understand some basics of the brain and extrapolate from there. the universe on the other hand, will always be mysterious simply because we can only observe so little of it.

[Guest wake]

Easy. Your brain wouldn't exist without the universe. Your brain is part of the universe.

 

Easy. Easy. Easy.

 

[Guest Ranky Redlof]

there would be no universe without the brain also

aha

opens a philosophical can of worms

[azatoth]

But which is more IDM?

 

The brain and the mind that it somehow creates also bring up fundamental questions. Will we be able to explain the human mind in a totally materialistic way? Neurons firing, synapses flowing with chemicals in elaborate fashion somehow gives rise to our experience of the surrounding world, things that can't be quantified in a scientific way. Is there a hard problem of consciousness?

 

The universe is huge, but we have still figured out a lot by just sending out a few probes here and there and doing other experiments here on our little rock in the vastness. We are able to re-create the moments that happened just after the big bang, we have a pretty good understanding on how stars form and how all the matter came to existence. We have discovered invisible matter and energy by just by observing the universe and have created tools and methods to perhaps observe it here on earth. That's pretty good for someone that hasn't even left the house. And all this in the last 100 years or so. Meanwhile we been wondering about our consciousness for at least 2000 years and haven't really gotten far to even define it satisfactorily.

 

Maybe it's all one and the same in the end. When or if we figure out one we also figure out the other.

[Guest Rambo]

Easy. Your brain wouldn't exist without the universe. Your brain is part of the universe.

 

Easy. Easy. Easy.

 

 

Of course but that ends the discussion. We are talking in a slightly different way. What is the universe? etc The mysteriousness of it.

[Guest Scrambled Ears]

well each person/brain is the center of its universe so in a way they are one in the same (insofar as being the axis of cause/effect)

 

which brings up the classical brain in a vat argument which people don't tend to appreciate because it implies a skeptical chain reaction. but reality is only corroborated, never proved so we don't really have a choice anyway but to accept that consciousness will necessarily be enveloped infinitely

[spratters]

Gotta be the universe. I feel with the speed we progress as we are, the more likely we can probe into the brain in a shorter space of time. I would like to say I understand far more than I do about the universe but i'd be wrong. I think as the universe is a possibly endless road we have a smaller chance to grasp a full understanding of it on the time we have left. I mean 'we' as in this species. So that's what, a few billion years?

[DerWaschbar]

I would say it is likely they we and our brains will have evolved to be almost unrecognizable from today before we have really scratched the surface of what is out there and that process is necessary for us to make further progress on the subject.

I don't think we will ever come to a complete understanding of either, as both are so complex and interrelated, changing and influencing each other.

It reminds me of that Isaac Asimov short, 'The Last Question'. <- Provided here conveniently in comic form.

[vertsk8er419]

funny you bring this up...yesterday when co-watching (at a friends) something called the 'morgan freeman wormhole' or some shit like that, they were putting so much time into talking about dark energy or dark matter, which makes up about 75 percent of the 'known' universe, and is actually the means by which it is expanding, of course intuitively this is already known, as you can't make up the majority of the whole and not play a vital factor in the growth and balance of the whole. but why do we know, fuck, next to NOTHING about this shit? again cause we as humans can't perceive it with our minds. correlation? as a whole we only use a small portion of what the brain is fully capable of, the majority of the brains abilities remain latent, because we can't live in balance. we're unable to balance our emotional bodies (heart), with our mental bodies (mind), with our physical ones, and often times we can't even maintain any of them.

 

we are missing a fusion of the haert and mind, of science and spirituality, imo. and we AINT gonna know shit about either the brain or the universe without it.

[azatoth]

as a whole we only use a small portion of what the brain is fully capable of, the majority of the brains abilities remain latent, because we can't live in balance.

 

This is a myth and not true. Our brain is used as a whole. How would you even measure how much of our brain we use? And considering that the brain uses a large part of our energy intake, it would be incredibly inefficient if it would be running at half capacity or less.

[vertsk8er419]

*sigh* anyways....i didn't vote because if you couldn't already tell from my post, i feel the universe and brain are both equally mysterious.

[DerWaschbar]

It's a big strange reality that much is for sure.

[azatoth]

*sigh* anyways....i didn't vote because if you couldn't already tell from my post, i feel the universe and brain are both equally mysterious.

 

C'mon son, don't be sad. What do you mean by balance? You sound like theosophist when saying that only by reconciling spirituality with science can we get true knowledge.

[Guest hahathhat]

Hmmm, maybe the questions left about the brain are more of the philosophical kind than downright scientific. It's hard to imagine what we could learn about our mind if we would be able to model our brains cell by cell in a computer. But I also have a feeling we could scientifically be able to explain the universe in much greater detail than the brain sometime in the future.

 

i just want an ice cream scoop of brain cells as a USB peripheral.

[Guest KY]

at first i voted the human brain, and then i thought, well why did i think that? and then i thought, how am i thinking this now?

 

 

 

but then i changed my vote to the universe anyway

[DerWaschbar]

i just want an ice cream scoop of brain cells as a USB peripheral.

 

This is the most reasonable thing I have heard in days.

[Guest Tamas]

I think the Universe is pretty mysterious but the fact that the brain is so close to us and is still not very well understood, I would say the brain is more mysterious. I don't know too much about the brain, though what I do understand is that various areas are connected to different functions based on activity, and enzymes/nutrients going to different parts. But to me it doesn't prove much, except that the brain definitely connects our mind to our body. Other than that, everything that I've read, seems to be jumping to a lot of conclusions, like that our memories are stored in the brain, etc. It could be like RAM I guess, but until we can connect a brain to some sort of device and download memories, I won't believe that...

 

The Universe, most of what we know in general seems to be going in a direction of more understanding, and so far I don't think we've hit many roadblocks about what we could learn about it.

 

Also, in terms of macroscopic and microscopic, to me, things that are macroscopic make more sense, and although the microscopic world effects the macroscopic one, I feel like we'll come closer to answering questions about the Universe as a whole as opposed to the brain itself. Since things in the brain happen at such a small scale, quantum mechanics could become involved, and fucked if I'd ever understand that haha. I suppose black holes etc are equally mysterious, but to me, considering how "close" we are to our brains, I definitely think it's more mysterious.

[azatoth]

I remain skeptic to the idea that quantum mechanics play a role in brain function. The brain is still very large if compared to the scale where quantum phenomenon happen. Quantum mysticism has some thought-provoking ideas, but the likes of Deepak Chopra seems to want to link the strangeness of quantum physics with the strangeness of consciousness without really having a handle on either and without having any scientific basis. Maybe it turns out that quantum mechanics do play a role in our brain, but as far as I can tell, we are not at a stage to make such proclamations yet.

[Guest Tamas]

I remain skeptic to the idea that quantum mechanics play a role in brain function. The brain is still very large if compared to the scale where quantum phenomenon happen. Quantum mysticism has some thought-provoking ideas, but the likes of Deepak Chopra seems to want to link the strangeness of quantum physics with the strangeness of consciousness without really having a handle on either and without having any scientific basis. Maybe it turns out that quantum mechanics do play a role in our brain, but as far as I can tell, we are not at a stage to make such proclamations yet.

Yeah I really wouldn't know anything about it at all except that I've always believed the brain to have "unknown qualities", and something like that could explain it. I mainly used this article I read recently as a springboard, where a theory about how quantum physics could explain our sense of smell. Couldn't find the original link but here's an older article about it. Some page

 

Some day maybe though!!! I hope I do live to see the day that we understand the brain better, but I sort of hope we realize that it'll never be understood. I think the real test of our understanding of the brain would be to simulate it exactly, with all the atoms, and to see if it can function. If it can't, we must be missing something. That's the thing, simulations of the Universe have been run, and they seem to have correlations in the real Universe.