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Neurons outside the brain

https://essays.debugyourpain.com/p/you-are-not-just-your-brain
19•yichab0d•3h ago

Comments

yichab0d•3h ago
"[i]f you look closely at our nervous system, you’ll see that there are neuronal clusters distributed throughout the body. Human computation is better understood as distributed than centralized."
pixl97•18m ago
It's kind of like having a computer at the home, but tens of thousands of computers at a data center. Things like reflexes can happen quickly because you don't have to go all the way to the brain, but your arm isn't going to be adding 2+2 by itself.
krackers•1h ago
>but it is also possible to live in more harmonious relation between the head, heart, and gut — all the intelligence centers.

Aren't those the supposed locations of the "chakras"?

bitwize•1h ago
Gurdjieff was literally, physically correct: we are three-brained beings.
siavosh•49m ago
A very powerful meditation practice is called self-inquiry. One version of it is after you calm your mind down (say with breath meditation) you look for where u think u r. Wherever that is, ask yourself if that’s where u r, what is looking at it? Keep going, don’t intellectualize it, and keep looking.
xg15•40m ago
By the same logic, you could ask "what part of a computer 'is' the computer? The CPU? The hard drive? The RAM? The TPM? The power supply? The sum of all peripherals? Etc"

You could ask all kinds of philosophical questions about this, but at the end of the day, there are parts that are easily replaceable and parts that are harder if you want to preserve the identity of a particular machine.

E.g. while RAM, CPU, GPU, power supply etc are all essential for running a PC, you can also swap them out without many problems. In contrast, the data on the hard drives or the TPM might be hard or impossible to restore.

In the same way, I'd still see the brain as the center of the self, because so much cognitive information is stored there.

nlarion•38m ago
Interesting article, Douglas Hofstadter's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop takes it a step further and says that parts of our consciousness/soul lives outside of ourselves and in the minds and brains of others. Since one can generally guess how person you know would respond in a given situation, such as how a spouse might be able to know exactly what their spouse would say/do, and in that sense our "souls" are distributed. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but I think that gets the point across of how parts of ourselves live in others.
kpil•4m ago
I think that is Hofstadter grieving his wife, and reflecting on how we embed models or predictions of others in our own neural networks, more than anything else.

We build models of the world in order to predict it.

But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.

14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-14-year-old-is-using-origami-to-design-emergency-s...
219•bookofjoe•3h ago•37 comments

Study: Self-generated Agent Skills are useless

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12670
59•mustaphah•57m ago•30 comments

Suicide Linux (2009)

https://qntm.org/suicide
46•icwtyjj•1h ago•24 comments

Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers

https://www.lirbank.com/harnessing-postgres-race-conditions
30•lirbank•1h ago•12 comments

Show HN: Wildex – we built Pokémon Go for real wildlife

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wildex-identify-plants-animals/id6748092158
21•AnujNayyar•1h ago•11 comments

What your Bluetooth devices reveal

https://blog.dmcc.io/journal/2026-bluetooth-privacy-bluehood/
243•ssgodderidge•7h ago•84 comments

Visual Introduction to PyTorch

https://0byte.io/articles/pytorch_introduction.html
59•0bytematt•3d ago•4 comments

Turing Labs (YC W20) Is Hiring – Founding GTM Sales Hacker

1•turinglabs•1h ago

PCB Rework and Repair Guide [pdf]

https://www.intertronics.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/PCB-Rework-and-Repair-Guide.pdf
55•varjag•2d ago•8 comments

Show HN: Jemini – Gemini for the Epstein Files

https://jmail.world/jemini
170•dvrp•16h ago•37 comments

State of Show HN: 2025

https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/
30•kianN•2h ago•3 comments

Show HN: Free Alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue

https://github.com/zachlatta/freeflow
21•zachlatta•1h ago•8 comments

Qwen3.5: Towards Native Multimodal Agents

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.5
343•danielhanchen•12h ago•161 comments

The Long Tail of LLM-Assisted Decompilation

https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-long-tail-of-llm-assisted-decompilation/
18•knackers•3h ago•3 comments

WebMCP Proposal

https://webmachinelearning.github.io/webmcp/
111•Alifatisk•5h ago•56 comments

Neurons outside the brain

https://essays.debugyourpain.com/p/you-are-not-just-your-brain
20•yichab0d•3h ago•8 comments

How to take a photo with scotch tape (lensless imaging) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97f0nfU5Px0
77•surprisetalk•5h ago•3 comments

History of AT&T Long Lines

https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-...
52•p_ing•5h ago•25 comments

Chiplets Get Physical: The Days of Mix-and-Match Silicon Draw Nigh

https://www.eejournal.com/article/chiplets-get-physical-the-days-of-mix-and-match-silicon-draw-nigh/
11•transpute•2d ago•2 comments

Ghidra by NSA

https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra
276•handfuloflight•2d ago•152 comments

Use protocols, not services

https://notnotp.com/notes/use-protocols-not-services/
234•enz•3h ago•71 comments

Kim Dotcom says Palantir allegedly hacked

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/2023165849721536672
19•hooch•27m ago•6 comments

Privilege is bad grammar

https://tadaima.bearblog.dev/privilege-is-bad-grammar/
131•surprisetalk•4h ago•121 comments

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

https://mastodon.world/@knowmadd/116072773118828295
1353•novemp•15h ago•837 comments

Fff.nvim – Typo-resistant code search

https://github.com/dmtrKovalenko/fff.nvim
17•neogoose•2h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Simple org-mode web adapter

https://github.com/SpaceTurth/Org-Web-Adapter
49•turth•5h ago•4 comments

Looks: A Halide Mark III Preview

https://www.lux.camera/mark-iii-looks/
66•patrikcsak•2d ago•17 comments

Show HN: 2D Coulomb Gas Simulator

https://simonhalvdansson.github.io/2D-Coulomb-Gas-Tools/index_gpu.html
16•swesnow•2h ago•4 comments

Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

https://www.legalcheek.com/2026/02/ministry-of-justice-orders-deletion-of-the-uks-largest-court-r...
461•harel•8h ago•311 comments

Running My Own XMPP Server

https://blog.dmcc.io/journal/xmpp-turn-stun-coturn-prosody/
194•speckx•8h ago•120 comments