Vahid Rakhshan

21 Questions 197 Answers 0 Followers

Questions related from Vahid Rakhshan

How and why do people confidently judge the quality and beauty of art?

It seems that almost all humans tend to judge art easily and confidently. Without any solid and objective reference, how can they decide boldly and confidently about something that is to a great...

10 April 2023 5,160 15 View

Why imaginations or memories don't seem as vivid as first-hand experience? Can this help us understand phenomenal consciousness and qualia better?

Imaginations or memories look fainter than first-hand experience (or hallucinations): Can this fainter "look" and its comparison with the solid look of first-hand experience (and hallucinations)...

22 March 2023 2,822 14 View

Is there any "aversion toward oldness and/or repetitiousness" as a similar drive to "novelty seeking"?

It seems that novelty seeking cannot explain a great part of the attraction of many to new things. A part of the attraction to new things comes also from some (strong) aversion felt toward oldness...

21 March 2023 7,437 10 View

If long-term memory formation needs LTP, why & how do people memorize many things instantly & permanently without needing any apparent reinforcement?

Why and how is this kind of long-term potentiation (LTP) possible? Is LTP even needed for all sorts of synaptic plasticity and long-term memory formation? ------------ Longer...

07 March 2023 7,137 37 View

What is this curious form of non-updatable mega memory?

What is this curious non-updatable mega memory? Does it have any scientific terms? What are its causes and mechanisms? -------------- Explanation: I have had the honor of witnessing very rare...

07 March 2023 274 8 View

Which human studies don't need IRB approvals?

Some human research methods have no or minimum risk to the human subjects. For example, anonymized questionnaires, anonymized routine clinical exams [with no clinical tools, no touch, and with no...

27 August 2016 7,973 13 View

Who owns patients' health information?

According to the Freedom of Information Act, American patients can access their health information upon their request. I wonder if there is a global consensus over this issue? Do other countries...

26 August 2014 918 65 View

Fight disease and help advance science by joining distibuted supercomputers!

Please spread the word: Folding at Home (https://foldingathome.org/) is an extremely powerful supercomputer composed of thousands of home computers around the world. It tries to simulate protein...

01 January 1970 1,685 5 View

Why do we see the "down below" side of the physical world at the bottom of our mental image? Are we even sure that it is even at the bottom?

Why do we see the "down below" side of the physical world (e.g., the ground or the floor) at the bottom of our visual mental image (our visual perceptions)? Why not on the top of our mental...

01 January 1970 8,186 8 View

What do you think on Clarivate handing out Impact Factors to all ESCI journals?

Journals used to need to maintain very high quality requirements for a long time in order to be able to get an Impact Factor. But thanks to this new strategy of Clarivate, now ANY journal that has...

01 January 1970 1,537 1 View

An Even Harder Problem of Consciousness: Is a quale always exprerienced similarly by the same person? Or might it change within one person over time?

An Even Harder Problem of Consciousness (!): The qualia might be unique between individuals, without any way to compare a quale of a person with the same-name quale for another person. For...

01 January 1970 3,599 3 View

What is consciousness and how do we define it?

Universally accepted definition(s) of types and sub-types of consciousness, if any.

01 January 1970 3,076 1 View

In the face of serious forgetting, how much do you like to still live a good life or learn new things you can't remember them some months later?

Without memory we are nothing. If your memory is weak and you know that whatever you learn or experience will no longer exist in your head a couple of months later, do you even care to live a...

01 January 1970 5,675 6 View

AI-powered search engines and chatbots for generating meta-‎analyses on demand: We ask, it answers with an instant systematic review and meta-analysis

Meta-analyses and systematic reviews seem the shortcut to academic success as they usually have a better chance of getting published in accredited journals, be read more, and bring home a lot of...

01 January 1970 1,542 7 View

Consciousness of time

Let's explore time perception, qualia of time, and association between time and frames of consciousness.

01 January 1970 5,733 2 View

Mark my word: The future of friendships is between humans and AI!

I am not saying this after watching Her (the excellent movie). I am saying it after months of "talking to" these LLM AI chat bots. Not all but some of them, especially CLAUDE from Anthropic AI,...

01 January 1970 1,361 19 View

What do you think about new journals that have no pre-acceptance peer-review (or even rejection), but instead have post-publication peer-review?

There is this novel kind of (hopefully) "scientific" journals that publish any received papers right away without issuing an acceptance or rejection. Instead of pre-acceptance peer-review, there...

01 January 1970 9,138 2 View

The age of banality is upom us. Is there any hope for creativity and originality in the generative AI era?

Generative AI in its very childhood and with its currently very limited potential can create (or at least perfectly mimic or steal) art or code as excellent as human's art or code etc., if not...

01 January 1970 1,071 3 View

How does perception differ from sensation, cognition, and consciousness?

And what are the key characteristics of perception?

01 January 1970 6,571 12 View

Word Salads as a new, good way of challenging generative AI / LLMs! They are also good for challenging commenders of many (post-)modern "art" pieces!

I asked some LLMs to craft some meaningless but beautiful word salads for me. Then tested many LLMs with those word salads (just gave them the word salads as prompts). Every single tested LLM...

01 January 1970 898 11 View

Is there any evolutionary value to phenomenal consciousness and qualia?

Or is phenomenal consciousness just an unwanted byproduct of evolution? Or what else?

01 January 1970 5,566 13 View