[ExI] More thoughts on sentient computers

[Giovanni Santostasi]

*Giovanni: Our brain is a simulation, not sure why it is not understood by
most people. *
Dave:  I don't think it's true. Our brains are biological organs. I don't
understand what you think they're simulations of.
It is a simulation of the "real world".  When we process information about
sensory inputs we have in our brain routines that interpret what the
signals mean, this is done in a hierarchical way. From simple components of
the sensory information all the way to naming the object in our head,
associating it with similar experiences we had in the past and so on. For
example, let's say you see a red box. You are really not "seeing" the box
but simulating it in your head (maybe simulating is not the best word but
close enough). You visual cortex breaks down the sensory input in small
components like the angles of the box, different angles activate different
neurons, the color of the box activate different type of neurons according
to the wavelength of the light, all this basic info is passed to different
layers of neurons that interpret to a higher level the information as puts
it together in creating an interpretation of what you are seeing. Your
brain has models of how the light in an environment is behaving and it
tries to make sense of what is seeing via these models. In a sense you are
creating a virtual red box not different from what is created in a computer
game via basic elements. This why we actually are able to navigate a
virtual space in a digital environment because the simulation of red boxes
in that environment is not very different from what our brain is already
doing when interprets the world.
All this shows that even sensory experiences are a kind of simulation, now
consider ideas, memories, abstract concepts, theory of minds we use to
interpret social interactions or other beings not necessarily human actions
and so on and on. It is all a simulation. You would not doubt a dream is a
simulation given you make up everything in it but the waking state is not
that different, instead of stimulating random regions of your brain to
activate memory and the equivalent of sensory inputs you actually get the
inputs from the external world and so your experience is more coherent and
anchored to the physical reality. But how this information is processed,
interpreted, made sense of is not that different from what happens in a
dream. This is not just my idea but there is a large body of evidence to
support this conclusion from how magic tricks work, to optical illusions,
to split brain experiments, people with different brain defects and
illnesses and so on. Basically we make up stuff most of the time, we
confabulate about the little filtered information we receive to make sense
of the world. We do this all the time, maybe you don't think about this as
a "simulation" but it is, we are modelling the world, that is indeed
another way to say we are making a simulation of it in our heads.

Giovanni




On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 7:39 AM Dave S via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023 at 3:00 AM, Giovanni Santostasi via
> extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Our brain is a simulation, not sure why it is not understood by most
> people.
>
>
> I don't think it's true. Our brains are biological organs. I don't
> understand what you think they're simulations of.
>
> We make up the world. Most of our conscious life is actually filling the
> gaps, confabulating to make sense of the sensory information we receive
> (highly filtered and selected) and our internal mental states.
>
>
> If you're saying that our internal representations of the world are
> inaccurate and incomplete, I agree.
>
> -Dave
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