...How I wish that I could be like any other man.
These words from the song "Nature's dance" (Ayreon, The final Experiment) have tormented my mind for a long time.
Even if the song probably refers to a blind man it makes no difference as that's exactly the way I felt for a long time since my childhood.
It's difficult to explain what I was feeling for many years (will be easier to understand for those who consciously experienced the same thing) but I'll try. I was about 10 years old when I realized it the first time. My sight was changing. I was not seeing things around me in the same way as before. I couldn't tell exactly when that happened, I could only remember what I was used to experience when looking around me when I was a child. It was astonishment, it was excitement, it was curiosity, I was "really" looking at the world around me. All of these experiences were gradually fading away but I realized it only when they were completely disappeared. Since that day looking around me was not the same. I could see things perfectly, my mind kept repeating "look this is my wardrobe, that's my window, that's the sun, but I can't sense it!", my brain was not stimulated in the same way. My way of experiencing the world around me had changed so much that I started feeling blind. I've received a catholic education which at that time had still its influences and I do remember praying God for long time before going to sleep asking him to give me back my sight. No God ever answered my prayers and that might have been my first God delusion.
So what happened during my childhood? What terrible experience left an innocent child like me with such a big torment to bear? I wish I had knew the answer at that time, it would have saved some prayers at least. When I was in the first years of my life I didn't have a model of the world. When we look at things for the first time our brain builds a model of them. We use these models for our whole life, we adapt and change them, they are the base of what we call imagination. We close our eyes thinking of a sheep and there it is, floating in a distributed neural configuration. These models are used when we make a prediction (conscious or not) and when we take a decision for instance. In every dimension of what we call thinking we make use of them. When I was 10 I had probably finished building a quite complete model of the world that surrounded me. Once such models are built the process of looking at something is a mere look-up of that model based on a visual pattern. When in the middle of a conversation we find out that one of these models don't match the reality we say "Oh really? I always thought that John was his brother" which shows a high correlation between what we call thinking and the interactions with these models (and also shows that John maybe wasn't his brother). For Buddhists there is no real thing and everything we sense is a mind projection. Some others say that we don't live in a real world but that each one of us just lives within his own model. However you want to look at it is sure that our brain builds and constantly updates this model.
Steve Grand thinks of a brain as a predictive machine that, based on this active model of the outside world is capable of producing predictive judgements that can drive proactive and anticipatory behavior
Marvin Minsky speaks of our ability to create new ways to represent information.The question of how we can create models of anything we could meet is indeed an intriguing one. But are we sure we can do it without any limit? If I ask you to think about an elephant with two heads I'm sure you can do it without too much effort. But can you really think of something which does not belong to this Middle world as Richard Dawkins defines it? Can we have such a model of a quantum force field for instance? How are models connected to each other? These questions require much more space and time to be analyzed and I'll go back on them at a later time. Wish me a good night now.
These words from the song "Nature's dance" (Ayreon, The final Experiment) have tormented my mind for a long time.
Even if the song probably refers to a blind man it makes no difference as that's exactly the way I felt for a long time since my childhood.
It's difficult to explain what I was feeling for many years (will be easier to understand for those who consciously experienced the same thing) but I'll try. I was about 10 years old when I realized it the first time. My sight was changing. I was not seeing things around me in the same way as before. I couldn't tell exactly when that happened, I could only remember what I was used to experience when looking around me when I was a child. It was astonishment, it was excitement, it was curiosity, I was "really" looking at the world around me. All of these experiences were gradually fading away but I realized it only when they were completely disappeared. Since that day looking around me was not the same. I could see things perfectly, my mind kept repeating "look this is my wardrobe, that's my window, that's the sun, but I can't sense it!", my brain was not stimulated in the same way. My way of experiencing the world around me had changed so much that I started feeling blind. I've received a catholic education which at that time had still its influences and I do remember praying God for long time before going to sleep asking him to give me back my sight. No God ever answered my prayers and that might have been my first God delusion.
So what happened during my childhood? What terrible experience left an innocent child like me with such a big torment to bear? I wish I had knew the answer at that time, it would have saved some prayers at least. When I was in the first years of my life I didn't have a model of the world. When we look at things for the first time our brain builds a model of them. We use these models for our whole life, we adapt and change them, they are the base of what we call imagination. We close our eyes thinking of a sheep and there it is, floating in a distributed neural configuration. These models are used when we make a prediction (conscious or not) and when we take a decision for instance. In every dimension of what we call thinking we make use of them. When I was 10 I had probably finished building a quite complete model of the world that surrounded me. Once such models are built the process of looking at something is a mere look-up of that model based on a visual pattern. When in the middle of a conversation we find out that one of these models don't match the reality we say "Oh really? I always thought that John was his brother" which shows a high correlation between what we call thinking and the interactions with these models (and also shows that John maybe wasn't his brother). For Buddhists there is no real thing and everything we sense is a mind projection. Some others say that we don't live in a real world but that each one of us just lives within his own model. However you want to look at it is sure that our brain builds and constantly updates this model.
Steve Grand thinks of a brain as a predictive machine that, based on this active model of the outside world is capable of producing predictive judgements that can drive proactive and anticipatory behavior
Marvin Minsky speaks of our ability to create new ways to represent information.The question of how we can create models of anything we could meet is indeed an intriguing one. But are we sure we can do it without any limit? If I ask you to think about an elephant with two heads I'm sure you can do it without too much effort. But can you really think of something which does not belong to this Middle world as Richard Dawkins defines it? Can we have such a model of a quantum force field for instance? How are models connected to each other? These questions require much more space and time to be analyzed and I'll go back on them at a later time. Wish me a good night now.