davidhs

We all know that natural language communication between people never leads to misunderstanding.

I have lots of eye floaters which annoy me when I'm looking at bright uniform surfaces, such as white paper or white background, but I hardly notice them with dark mode.

What are the other 4 top programming books?

To give a better context for my comment to OP, I began (again) practicing meditation early January this year by following the book The Mind Illuminated. I am now mostly working on stages 3 and 4 of the book. I noticed, in my mind, when I was using the technique Follow the Breath my mind chattering would mostly cease, not that I intentionally tried to suppress it. I still experience a kind of narration of what is happening in the moment.

I do concentration meditation. After about 15 minutes most of my mind chatter has dissipated.

I mean "simulated" in the same sense as how computational machines can simulate any other computational machine, as in you can define some arbitrary state and arbitrary rules and with such a machine apply those rules to the state to change it.

I say that because of that's what I best understand the neocortex doing (it does that and probably something more). If you buy in what the Numenta people are talking about, then certain neurons in your neocortex configure themselves to be able to predict their inputs better, so they start to form a model of their input. In aggregate, these neurons probably start to learn multiple sequential models of their input.

My guess it that these models in the brain interact with each other. I think some of the larger models that the brain models is us (individually), the environment we find ourselves in, our mind, how we relate to it, the 3D space that we find ourselves in, and such.

This is a simulation to explain what is going on "out there" (the physical world) so that the physical organism can successfully navigate "out there".

This simulated world, body, and such, is what is "real" to us.

The simulated experience is the real experience.

I think what you mean by reality is physical reality, if so then it is impossible for us to directly experience it. You are a simulated being in a simulated world. The simulated world runs on a physical brain. Everything you experience is "hallucinations," but if your physical brain works normally then they will be constrained to explain the input to the brain. Consciousness is most likely a property or set of properties of this simulation. Some part of your brain make predictive models of its input, and the things that it models is yourself, your current environment, other stuff going on (the mind), how these things relate to each other and such. My guess is that qualia is something like primitives to this simulated world.

What if we have the misconception of thinking we are a physical person in a physical world that has access to a weird mind? What if instead they physical brain is simulating the universe we find ourselves individually in, and we are only simulated, and we infer a physical world.

You can at least scientifically model and test this.

> I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe.

I think it's much more likely that consciousness is a result of brain activity. For example, if consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe, why don't I have any reliable access to what is going on except partially in my immediate vicinity? Also, how can it create such a wonderfully consistent world out there and I can not reliably drive to store because my mind is preoccupied and the rest of me goes on autopilot.

I think you would require fewer bits to explain it the other way around.

I don't think consciousness is an embodied phenomenon. It's probably just a property or set of properties of the simulated world that we find ourselves in (the simulated world running on the brain).

To me, embodiment such and such seems pseudoscientific. How is it possible at this point in time that anything inside your pinky toe might be influencing the activity of your brain without sending nerve signals to the brain or secreting something into its surrounding which might eventually signal the brain? By some spooky magic?

> What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses?

From what I can best tell, consciousness is a property or a set of simulated properties, I don't really know what it is and I guess we won't have good answers for it until we will be able to properly simulate something like a brain and have better brain theories to explain it.

But the world you find yourself is a simulation, and your body is simulated. Everything you consciously experience is simulated. This simulation is running inside your brain. Part of your brain is trying to explain its input so it makes models to predict its inputs. I think it learns a model of your body, and your mind, and how these thing relate to each other and how they relate to what you experience "out there".

> I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions even answerable?

Yes. (I think so)

Certain kinds of pain stimulus causes you automatically to move away from it, such as when you put your hand on a stove.

But parts of your body might be sending pain signals into the brain for which there are no automatic actions for, e.g. you are in a sauna and it's too much.

The state of the simulation that you are in is updated with this pain signal. So, now, you might experience discomfort in the sauna and it is repellent so you might want to construct an action plan to move away from the source that is causing the pain (the fact you're in a sauna). But you might want to resist that for a moment and ignore the pain, maybe you have another conflicting goal which is to try to stay longer in the sauna than you're used to. Eventually the discomfort and pain might become overwhelming so you move out of the sauna.

Well, I think in some sense it's all just "controlled" hallucination, but, to me, it doesn't say much.

Sometimes I think people have some intuitive sense of how things ought to work but but they can't reconcile it with physics description of the world. For example, how is it possible that a physical system such as a brain can have experiences, such as colors, love, objects, music, etc.

I think the simplest answer to that conundrum is that, yes, physical systems can not have these sorts of experiences, they do not follow from the theories or descriptions. But what you can do instead is simulate a world with such magical qualities. This is what I think some parts of the brain do, is to simulate the world that we personally find ourselves in.

Then the real question is how does the brain do that? How does it work? What are its learning rules? What does it end up learning?

My guess is that it ends up describing this universe (including ourselves) that we find ourselves in.

Why? You could imagine that the signals coming into the brain from the rest of the body are just a bit array that is changing all the time. What does it mean? That's for the brain to find out, so it's always in the process of making and updating predictive models of its input. Why? So that the biological robot that you are in control of navigate successfully in the physical world and meet the needs of the organism, e.g. eat food, drink water, keep itself in the right temperature, keep itself from being harmed, and such.

Well, the reason we have experience at all is because that is being simulated by the brain. For me a more interesting question is how it is being simulated by the brain.

I have orthostatic hypotension, which doesn't affect me as much since I've gained weight, and I've lost consciousness from standing to quickly up, but sometimes it doesn't all go away. I black out, a moment later I am somewhere, I don't know who I am or where I am, a moment later the rest fills in.

The way I understand it as the blood pressure drops your brain stops to function properly but it might still somewhat function. As blood pressure goes back up more parts of the brain resume normal function but the "functional" state of the brain might still be abnormal. The current state is unstable, especially when new functionality starts to come back online and resume normal behavior, and the state of the brain quickly moves from a unstable state to a more stable normal state.

I was a physicalist (and in some sense still am). In a nutshell your self and everything you experience and can experience is simulated. I live inside a simulation. The simulation is running on a physical brain, part of a physical human which is part of a physical universe.

This can also be probed with science. If we know how the brain wires itself, what it is computing and representing then I think we'll find these patterns in the brain.

This is how I best understand these things. I can also go into more detail how I came to think about this this way and how I got to this point.

You are a simulated person running inside a simulated universe that is being simulated on a physical brain inside a physical human inside a physical universe.

With meditation you can learn for example how to turn off your simulated self. With certain psychoactive substances you alter the dynamics of your physical brain which causes it to simulate a somewhat different universe.