Comment by WhitneyLand
4 days ago
You say you don’t believe something is true and then say you don’t know, but I’ll disagree with “electrical signals don’t “define” (encode) thoughts.
To be clear, of course it’s true that our thoughts are more than just electrical activity. The brain is a system. However, it seems clear that thoughts are at least partially encoded in electrical activity.
What you mentioned those startups will find fruitless, that’s already been done for years in a research setting. It may not be a successful business model, but it’s already been demonstrated.
There are fMRI studies and electrical measurement studies. You could argue fMRI decoding of images is not electrical activity which is true, but a bunch or work shows they are strongly correlated.
For electrical activity alone we’re already decoding information like words, so it’s hard to claim electrical activity doesn’t define thoughts.
Maybe you mean to say, doesn’t define all the content of our thoughts which is a much different claim.
Well, if you are making the assertion, which you implicitly seem to be, you must first define thought. Is a word == thought? And of correlations, we all know the adage about correlation and causation. Not that I would make the counter argument, that thought is not encoded by electrical signals, but I would bet you aren’t totally correct. Do you think there will be no future paradigm shifts?
I think we may not be disagreeing much…
Agree fMRI doesn’t tell us for sure what information is in electrical activity. I only mean to imply it’s suggestive.
But we still can get a lot of information from electrodes. Do words count as thoughts? I’d say so.
Definitely don’t think electrical signals are all there is to thought.
They’re definitely part of it, but I think time will show unlike with computer parts, it’s hard to make clean separation of responsibilities in the brain.