Electronically-assisted telepathy?

[tevarin]

Scientists conducted an experiment where they asked people in an MRI brain scanner to look at ten pictures of different tools and houses. Meanwhile, the researchers fed the data into a computer algorithm so that the program would learn to recognize the unique signature of electrical patterns produced by the objects in each subject's brain.

Comments

[anonymous]

But it seems we're more alike than that. Why? I can't think of any way we could have evolved a specific neural net for recognizing a screwdriver.Hm. Perhaps laziness

[tevarin]

Intelligent design + re-use of code sounds like a viable explanation, whether the designer is deific, alien, extra-universal, or whatever.

There may be other possibilities, similarly outlandish: Maybe our neural circuits get their templates from a Jung-style collective unconscious?

It could be more localized. If a child's caregivers somehow imprint their own brain patterns onto the kid, then a whole culture could end up with similar patterns. The imprinting could be subconscious telepathy, or somehow mediated through speech, body language, etc. You could test this theory by using the brain scanner on patients from very different cultural backgrounds, New Guinea tribesmen and whatnot.

I'm not sure I buy the other arguments for us being a simulation. I'm inclined towards the first and second options in Bostrom's tripartition--

At least one part of Bostrom's tripartition must be true