zlacker

Is there a name for the somewhat uncomfortable feeling caused by seeing something like this? I wish I could better describe it. I just somehow feel a bit strange being presented with microscopic images of brain matter. Is that normal?

>>g4zj+(OP)
Trypophobia, visceral, uncanny, squeamish?

>>g4zj+(OP)
Is it the shapes, similar to how patterns of holes can disturb some people? Or is it more abstract, like "unknowable fragments of someone's inner-most reality flowed through there"? Not that I have a name for it either way. The very shape of it (in context) might represent an aspect of memory or personality or who knows what.

>>greenb+r1
> "unknowable fragments of someone's inner-most reality flowed through there"

It's definitely along these lines. Like so much (everything?) that is us happens amongst this tiny little mesh of connections. It's just eerie, isn't it?

Sorry for the mundane, slightly off-topic question. This is far outside my areas of knowledge, but I thought I'd ask anyhow. :)

>>g4zj+(OP)
For me the disorder of it is stressful to look at. The brain has poor cable management.

That said I do get this eerie void feeling from the image. My first thought was to marvel how this is what I am as a conscious being in terms of my "implementation", and it is a mess of fibers locked away in the complete darkness of my skull.

There is also the morose feeling from knowing that any image of human brain tissue was once a person with a life and experiences. It is your living brain looking at a dead brain.

>>g4zj+(OP)
I’m not religious but it’s as close to a spiritual experience as I’ll ever have. It’s the feeling of being confronted with something very immediate but absolutely larger than I’ll ever be able to comprehend

>>g4zj+(OP)
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

>>g4zj+Q1
It's kind of feeling a bit like an intruder? There probably is a name for that.

>>g4zj+(OP)
When I did fetal pig dissection, nothing bothered me until I got to the brain. I dunno what it is, maybe all those folds or the brain juice it floats in, but I found it disconcerting.

>>g4zj+(OP)
It makes me think humans aren't special, and there is no soul, and consciousness is just a bunch of wires like computers. Seriously, to see the ENTIRETY of human experience, love and tragedy and achievement, are just electric potentials transmitted by those wiggly cells, just extinguishes any magic I once saw in humanity.

>>carabi+ie
Welcome to the Existential Bar at the End of the Universe

>>carabi+ie
You might be confusing the interface with the operating system.

>>g4zj+(OP)
https://scaleofuniverse.com/en

>>carabi+ie
I dunno, the whole of human experience is what I expect of a system composed of 100,000,000,000,000 entities, with quintillions of interconnections, interacting together simultaneously on a molecular level. Happiness, sadness, love and hate can (obviously) be described and experienced with this level of complexity.

I'd be much more horrified to see our consciousness simplified to anything smaller than that, which is why any hype for AGI because we invented chatbots is absolutely laughable to me. We just invented the wheel and now hope to drive straight to the Moon.

Anyway, you are seeing a fake three dimensional simplification of a four+ dimensional quantum system. There is at least one unseen physical dimension in which to encode your "soul"

>>carabi+ie
Er, why can’t the wires be the experience ?

If the wires make consciousness then there is consciousness. The substrate is irrelevant and has no bearing on the awesomeness of the phenomena of knowing, experiencing and living.