Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Another busy busy day, and a question.

Another day reading and calibrating experiments and whatnot, the usual. The project I'm doing is coming along nicely, despite some unexpected setbacks. They had to fire a technician, and organized bunch of backups I had lying around. I might be able to finally get back to writing stuff around the net regularly! (just maybe)

Anyway, a little question popped into my mind a moment ago. Is there any documented difference in biological feature of a brain prior to and after 'knowing' something? We can babble about the philosophical aspects of knowledge over a life time and get nowhere. But since knowledge is a phenomenon happening upon real physical body, with supposedly observable consequences, there must be some outstanding physiological difference pertaining to the state of knowing something... Some kind of neural pathway formation? Network transfiguration? If there is an observable difference, will my brain be able to discern between the categories of knowledge? Knowledge of Greek arts in cabinet A, and knowledge of physics in cabinet B.... Somehow I find that notion unlikely, and by extension, the brain might as well be indiscriminate about the differentiation between processor and the data being processed... Both would be one and the same, unlike current architecture of most (all?) computers in use today.

If knowledge manifests itself as a pattern or some kind of change within the configuration of the physical brain, what's stopping us from contemplating the possibility of instant knowledge gathering/transfer... Maybe even memories and personality. I might as well rewrite someone else's brain with my own brain data, in effect creating identical clone of myself with completely different genotype.

But what do I know? I'm but a humble student of physics, with no particular knowledge on biology or computers.       

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