The mind is flat
"Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental "surface" of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In this profoundly original book, behavioral scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, the author first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser"--Jacket.
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- The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater
(so hard to pick just one, and I may be affected by recency bias, but that's my finalist right now)
- Lots of folks pointing out the philosophy 101 nature of the post as PG appears to rediscover the basics of the free-will debate, but I think there's one interesting issue here:
>"How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?"
I think an interesting answer to this one is, you don't necessarily need to because a lot of intuitions we have about the nature of our own minds just kind of suck. Nick Chater wrote an interesting book a few years ago called The Mind is Flat in which he made the case that a lot of deep perceptions about ourselves are wrong. We literally just make most of it up as we go along. He went through lots of examples but one is this kind of thing[1]. How many dots are there on the grid? Weirdly enough more than you can see. When you see an entire image full of color turns out a good deal of that is also made up, as most of that visual perception only ever happens in the center, your brain filling in the rest.
Point being, perception is inherently constructed, and that probably does apply to perception of your own cognition. Elaborate notions of wants and free choice are likely rationalizations just as your mind goes along and does its thing. It puts a sort of empirical limit on your confidence which I think is more productive than these linguistic rabbit holes about wants of wants of wants.
[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/HermannG...
- Read "The Mind is Flat" - your idea is a theme of the book.
We already have a few examples of adversarial information for humans: optical illusions being the most widely discussed.
- Already plugged this book elsewhere in the thread, you might be interested in "The Mind is Flat". One chapter of the book explores the concept you're describing. Our brain creates the illusion of a "full picture" when often our imagination and internal representation is quite sparse. I think that's one of the key impressive qualities of our brains and general intelligence. We only do the minimum necessary imagination and computation. As we explore a particular concept or scene, our brains augment the scene with more details. In other words, our mind is making it up as we go along.
- This view is quite similar to the theory outlined in "The Mind Is Flat" book: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Flat-Remarkable-Shallowness-Impr... which I can greatly recommend.
- I can recommend The Mind is Flat https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Flat-Illusion-Mental-Improvised-... which is more high level, but still seems compatible with this theory.
