SevenCell

When you mention augmenting human capacity through BCIs, say to allow greater proficiency in maths, surely that presumes some high-level capacity to interpret brain signals as semantic thought?

If I want the answer to 2 + 7, how close are we to distinguishing the thought "2" from any other thought? How close is this to the thought "7", or any other number? How uniform is this across people?

A lot of this stuff has always seemed fanciful to me, but I'd love to be wrong.

Right, but that's my point - an ANI depends either on the physical aspect of thought being similar enough across people, that a general model would be applicable to any patient, or on specifically training the model on that person alone.

What would that entail? A computer tells you to think of the number two, and you think of two. Think of a carrot. Think of the abstract notion of love. The only way to train a network on thought would be manual, and it would take months.

Prostheses are impressive, but these are learning to interpret a minuscule input space compared to an entire mind, with an obvious way to evaluate the fitness - on these scales, of course a network solution will give a good result.

Unless you know empirically that similar thoughts are represented by similar physical aspects in all people, I'm still very sceptical.