Mind is the Brain Improving Itself

Intelligence is being able to see what is right in front of you. Ignorance is looking at the world before you and seeing what you were taught to see. For thousands of years people looked at the night sky and saw the stars moving above them in an arc across the heavens. It took real intelligence to finally recognize that the stars stood still and it was we who moved.

In similar fashion, ignorance looks out and sees a world consisting of objects and their properties, sees geometrical shapes and mathematical relationships and laws of motion. Intelligence, looking at the same world, sees the brain doing its thing, creating a world around us, creating a simulacrum, a virtual reality, so that we can act and know (can survive and thrive) within natural existence.

Does the world of objects in motion, objects with properties and relationships, exist? Yes—in our brains. This is the simulacrum created by the brain and presented to ourselves as consciousness. And we mind it. We try to remember it, understand it.

We analyze it. The mind is the brain improving itself, learning how to make better decisions.

These decisions are informed by the simulacrum, but the simulacrum is only a tool. We exist within the real unknown that surrounds us, outside of the simulacrum. We move and breathe and live within the natural world. The virtual reality created by our brain, using our senses, stands in for this unknown surrounding us.

Best of all, the virtual reality, the simulacrum, is knowable. It is constructed of the stuff of knowing. Thus the brain’s simulacrum can be improved with the application of knowledge, and the mind is the brain’s path to improving it. Literally, the mind is the brain improving itself.

So, how do I, how does anyone know that any of this simulacrum business is true?

We get there by learning to see the obvious in front of our faces, by noticing the edges and cracks of the simulacrum, the elements of its construction by the brain. Vision is where scientists have made the most progress in this direction. Scientists now have a very good understanding of how the brain creates the visual world which appears outside and beyond our eyes.

Optical illusions provided the first hints that our eyes didn’t passively detect an outside world. As scientists examined the retina, optic nerve, and visual cortex it became very clear that the brain actively creates our visual experiences using hints gathered from the sampling of photons.

It is our retinas which are engaged in this ongoing sampling of photons. But it’s important to realize that we don’t “see” photons. Our visual experience is not an experience of photons, it is an experience of remote scenes and objects of which our eyes, our retinas, have never ever had any actual contact.

Our eyes and our brains are incapable of detecting objects, but what what they can detect are chemical collisions of photons against the retina—and the brain uses these collisions to create a visual world for us to experience: a scenic virtual reality constructed of objects and movements.

This visual simulacrum with its constructed objects “stands in” for the physical world of which we are a part.

It order to dispel ancient (and even modern) misperceptions about vision, it might help to remember that the photons which crash into our retinas are neither part of nor belong to anything in the physical world simulated by the brain’s visual construction (an exception: when the brain simulates “rays of sunshine”).

The red apple we see on the table is a visual creation by the brain (so is the table), and the brain creates it by using our eyes to sample photons which bounced off of real somethings outside us in the physical world.

Result: we see a red apple. This apple, again, is a virtual construction by our brain presented to us as a visual experience, and as such the apple has properties. Importantly, we can investigate and think about (and remember and analyze) the properties of any object constructed by the brain. (There is a corollary to this: if something we are thinking about has “properties”, it is necessarily a construction of the brain, and therefore exists “in here” not “out there”—the stuff of the physical world around us doesn’t contain properties, or consist of objects per se.)

The apple we see on the table is red. Its redness, its shinyness, its apple-shapeness, its surface texture, its weight, its specific gravity, its sound when it rolls off the table and hits the floor, these are all properties of the brain-constructed virtual object. Some of its properties, its color and shape for example, are created in the visual cortex in the brain. Other object properties, such as sounds the object makes, or knowledge developed about the object by thinking about it, are created in other parts of the brain. All become properties of the object.

I said earlier that the actual stuff of the physical world (unlike visual objects constructed by the brain in order to stand in for that stuff) does not contain properties. But you might ask how can this be, if I’m seeing a red apple? Where did the apple’s redness come from, if not from outside me in the physical world? There’s got to be something “red” out there or I wouldn’t end up with “red” in here.

In fact, there is nothing “red” out there. Photons do not have color. You might think, well, photons have wavelengths and those wavelengths cause us to experience specific colors. This is both wrong and backwards.

It is backwards, in that photons do not cause us to have visual experiences. Our brains cause us to have visual experiences—this is one of the key lessons from the study of optical illusions. Our brains determine what we will experience. (You have probably seen illusions where you are asked to watch a video and count or attend to one thing, only to later learn that you never saw the person in a gorilla suit wandering through the scene—the requisite photons weren’t missing the first time you watched the video, but rather your brain determined what your visual experience would be based on the task at hand. Photons don’t cause vision, brains do.)

And it is equally wrong to think wavelength creates color. Optical illusions demonstrate that the brain analyzes a scene prior to creating objects or assigning colors, and the colors we experience vary depending on whether the brain determines that section of the scene to be in shadow or not in shadow. In a famous “rubric cube” optical illusion from MIT, the top of the cube is experienced as red and the left side is experienced as yellow, even though the related photons are the very same wavelength. This happens because the brain creates colors and assigns them to make object tracking as easy as possible.

Once we become informed about the science of vision, it revolutionizes our understanding of how we interact with the world. When we look out at the world, instead of believing we see the raw, physical world as it is, we realize that we see only the simulacrum, the brain’s visual reality created to stand in for the otherwise unknowable world around us.

We do not exist within this virtual reality. Rather, our body engages the world using it. (This is quite different from thinking we live within a virtual reality.) The simulacrum is a tool the brain creates for us, importantly a knowledge-improvable tool, which then helps us survive and thrive in the natural world which surrounds us.

It improves the usefulness of the simulacrum, when we become aware that it exists and is created by our neurons. This awareness helps us understand why the scientific method works so well, and why science must necessarily be based on pragmatic empiricism, its truths “true” within the simulacrum while at the same time pragmatically “useful” regarding the world that surrounds us. Knowing this helps us understand ourselves, as well as understand what we are doing when we think, when we remember, and when we learn.

As I said, it helps us understand who we are and what we are. Or at least, what we are not.

We are not the simulacrum. We are not the mind improving the simulacrum. We are not one of the brain’s tools.

We are not even the brain. We are the body, and the brain is one of our key parts. But it is not us. Nor consciousness, nor minding of consciousness. None of that is actually us. Saying so would be like looking at your left hand and declaring it to be the all of you, your essence, and then imagining that left hand romping delightfully in a celestial garden of flowers and insects.

Consciousness is a part of us, but it is not us. Mind is one of our most important aspects, but it is not by itself, us. We are the whole shebang. The mind serves the brain, and the brain serves the body.

Once you realize this, you see the silliness of thinking that it would be paradise to send one part of us, our consciousness, off to heaven. It would be useless without the whole shebang. It wouldn’t be me any more than my severed left hand dancing in paradise would be me. Once severed, it’s no longer a part of me. My brain in a vat is just a severed left hand. My soul or consciousness in heaven amounts to the same, a severed left hand.

I need my entire self, my body and my brain, my body and my consciousness, if I am to be me. And not only that. My consciousness—this simulacrum created by my brain so that I can survive and hopefully thrive within the natural world—what use is it thrown into heaven? It doesn’t exist for heaven. It exists for earth. Indeed, every part of me, limbs, hands, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines, bladder, skin, brain, mind, consciousness, exists for one place and one place only: earth.

Please don’t send me somewhere else and call it paradise. The only possible paradise, for me, is the one my body can fashion for itself here on earth. Put me anywhere else, and I could only be out of sorts with myself. Uncomfortable. And that would never be paradise for me.

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For more on the concept of the simulacrum, see The Basics and Rough Notes about Consciousness and Do We Live in a Simulation?