Tag: neuroscience

On Unpredictability of Human Mind

Published on October 8, 2021

The following appeared originally in a writers discussion forum, in response to a question on whether a sufficiently powerful computer could predict everything a human would do in advance, assuming everything was deterministic–and whether quantum interdeterminacy would interfere with that. What many people tend to forget is that “deterministic” doesn’t equal “predictable.” Let’s start with the classical formalism and then consider the quantum one. The equations of classical gravity are deterministic. Once you have the initial coordinates and velocity vectors for all bodies involved, the state of the world at any time T is uniquely determined. But is it actually…

Remembered Present and Mental Imagery

Published on March 11, 2021

Last time, we talked about writers on the aphantasia spectrum–a reduced detail of mental imagery (whether visual or audio or any other sensory modality, although I will use the visual one for examples). Interestingly, with few exceptions, the same level of detail (from almost-photographic to vague to near-nonexistent) applies not just to voluntary or involuntary imagining but also to memories and dreams. What is going on here? Could there be some commonality between these forms of mental imagery? Indeed, there is–at least, this is what current neuroscience tells us. In fact, most of our mental imagery is ultimately based on…