Actually, the question of whether brains are analog or digital is a big neurological debate right now, but here's one explanation on the analog side of the debate.

But regardless of where you fall in that debate, what I tried to point out in Unwired is that some translation is necessary. The human brain can not inherently understand the ASIST signals used in wireless computing in the 2070s. It's on page 186. The most common form of encoding used for simsense is ASIST Control Transport, where the full experience isn't even all in the signal. It's deliberately full of holes to compress the file size, but it comes with instructions for the sim module to fill in the gaps with approximations from the user's senses and emotions. Most people who experience an ASIST Control Transport signal won't ever know the difference; most of us only have our own emotions and senses as a reference point anyway. Much like most people won't hear the difference between a decently-encoded MP3 music file and a CD, even though the MP3 encoding is much more compressed. But just like you need an MP3 player or a CD player to make sense of the 1s and 0s in your music, something needs to make sense of the 1s and 0s in the ASIST data.

Technomancers, to function, must have some inherent way to translate the signal. It could be very similar to Complex Forms. But most people are not technomancers.

Well, you're getting into some real "fuzzy" area, as demonseed pointed out. My take is that although the underlying principle might be similar, from an EE (Electronic Engineering) standpoint a human is considered an analog receiver: it is not capable of directly receiving and acting upon an EM wave of encoded information. The brain is also not capable of performing the essential post signal reception cleanup that a digital receiving device has. Digital reception devices can take a signal and run it through a threshold detector and make a pretty accurate guess as to whether the signal at any particular moment in time was originally a 0 or a 1 that got modified by some random static. To put it simply: the signals that operate in the brain and the signals we use to send information through the air are different. Send information flying through the air is problematic and many decades worth of technological innovation has gone into making that process better, faster, and more reliable. Those systems have with them an integral component of a "smart" receiver that is able to analyze the data received and detect and correct potential problems. The brain doesn't have that, if we were capable of sending "brain signal" through the air, the brain as a receiver would simply "take it and use it."

Think about old "bunny ears" TVs or walkie-talkies. How often did you get fuzziness, static, weird glitches, noises, ghost images or sounds, etc. Sure that stuff was "strange" or possibly "annoying" but since it was just video or audio you (mentally or literally) shrugged and said, "oh well." Now imagine those signals are going into your brain and a burst of EM radiation that created a "hiss" on your radio now creates a "hiss" in your brain that gives you: phantom pain, involuntary muscle movement, or anything else the brain controls (like how fast your heart beats). Would you say a system like that "works?"


But Technomancers' brains are different, this has been stated in the setting. They are somehow "magically" different and able to interpret digital signals, so it is possible that part of their "living persona" intuitively performs the kind of "signal cleanup" that would be necessary to receive those signals without having noise on the signal blow unwanted holes in their brain.

This is only if you ignore recent advances in science that allow for photon and may allow for electron teleportation. If you can teleport electrons in some capacity, the ohm's law issue does not apply.

This is not a technology availible now, but it is plausible that it may be possible in the future.

Thats true once an action potential or PSP is initiated. Prior to that an individual neuron receives a massive amount of input, both excitatory and inhibitory. Hundreds (if not thousands) of little synapses all feeding a neuron information in the form of neurotransmitters, which in turn are subject to competition, degradation, re-uptake, etc, and which move across the synapse by diffusion and Brownian motion. The aggregate signal (excitatory or inhibitory) that reaches the post-synaptic neuron determines whether it fires or not. Even this is probably an oversimplification of what actually happens in vivo and it doesn't even take into account voltage gating and ionic movement across membranes (which is also analogue)

The problem is that the acting neuron, all its inhibitory neurons and all its excitatory neurons are packed together in a microscopically tiny space. In order for the "high density signal" to meaningfully activate a specific set of neurons it would have to hit only those neurons. Everything else would be analogue noise.

Digital devices actually work by threshold based triggering on analogue signals, which is not exactly disimilar. This is what causes jitter in digital devices.

I don't know enough about computer science to comment there, but I think saying the brain is all analogue or all digital is probably an oversimplification anyway.

That isn't a computer science question. That is an electronics question.

If you wish to consider the computer science level of abstraction, the brain is a turing machine just as is every other computer.

What I wish is to say again that calling the brain digital, analogue, a computer or a machine (turing or otherwise) is an oversimplification.

Sorry, omae, but the brain is just a Turing machine, unless you're a Cartesian dualist... (different from a Cartesian duelist, which would be much more interesting.)

But its a digitally analog Turing machine with several dozen sub-machines.* It doesn't operate in a manner whereby you can use induction to alter thoughts.

I said "digitally analog" because it deals with information in discrete units at varying frequencies (that exist along a continuum).

*The brain is capable of multiple simultaneous tasks independently, equivalent of a multicore CPU. Some of these tasks are relatively simple (keeping your heart pumping), some are not (writing a forum post**).

**Which is, in itself, composed of multiple sup-processes that occur simultaneously as well. The thinking about what you're saying, the formulation of coherent sentences, and moving your fingers.

Maybe not induction, but if you directly stimulate certain parts of the brain with electric energy, you can make it work however you want.
See also electroshock "therapy"

Cool, you managed to prove Church's thesis?


For the non-compsci types among us: Church's thesis postulates that everything which can be intuitively computed can also be computed by a turing machine, and vice versa. Due to the fact that "everything which can be intuitively computed" is not a well-defined set (ie. there is no formal definition of what belongs to this class of problems and what doesn't) Church's thesis is considered not provable, although nearly universally accepted to be true.

I know this isn't actually true, but in my mind, the Church-Turing thesis is one of those things like P = NP - we don't know the answer for sure, but come on.

You bet, no problem there. But anyone that concedes this point should also concede that advances in technology that allow for manipulation and teleportation of sub-atomic particles may also have a spin-off effect in creating computational power capable of making encryption look like a minor speed bump.

Oh I get the logic:

the brain is a computer
all computers are Turing machines
therfore the brain is a Turing machine.

The problem is in the first assumption. The brain can compute yes, but it is also capible of non-computational functions and things that defy math, logic or reason. To say it's simply a Turing machine is overlysimplistic.

Not with the knowledge or technology we have today, but this clearly has to be the case for SR's ASIST technology to work.

I started reading his alternate rules and the fluff was so wonderful, so well thought out, so well written, that I had to put it down and walk away. If I keep reading, then I'm going to have a more difficult time 6-10 months from now remembering what the "real" rules are what Frank's rules are. So, I just can't keep reading, I have to stop.

Like what? I'll grant you that this is really a philosophical question, but just because there's something that a computer hasn't done doesn't necessarily mean there are things that computers can't do.

(Of course there are things that computers can't do... but I don't think that a human could solve the halting problem either.)

A computer can not handle the following (logical) statement:

"This statement is false."

By evaluating as false the statement becomes true, but by evaluating as true the statement becomes false.

In short, such a statement would crash a computer, as it has no way of resolving the conflict. The human brain on the other hand recognizes it as meaningless and discards it. In Chinese and Japanese this is called mu.


Ooooh....Good quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on the definition of mu:

huh, i thought zero was off

Voltage != current.

maybe so, but you cant really have one without the other. At least not in any meaningful way...

Hate to disagree, but you can.

meaningful?

a open circuit is as close to meaningless as it gets.

I believe that Hobgoblin stated "Meaningful" somewhere in there...

It's all good though... I am a long way from my Electrical Engineering classes these days...

Keep the Faith

What's preventing a computer from discarding that statement as meaningless and discarding it, rather than trying to evaluate it?

I got the lowest grade, of three sections, in my Systems Architecture 1 class (the class where they teach you how to build hardware).

Amazingly I still passed.

But in any case, IIRC, a 0 in computers isn't zero volts it's anything blow the threshold of 5 volts. A 1 is anything above.