Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
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Re: Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
#2I was thinking about this recently—given how difficult it is to explain "why" an artificial neural network behaves a certain way, it's probably similarly difficult for our conscious minds to explain our unconscious behavior, the best they can do is pattern match and tell stories.
From the article: "If we could understand the processes by which billions of neurons cooperate to help us recognize a face or interpret a fragment of speech, we would find these as unrelated to the stream of consciousness as the operation of the liver."
Re: Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
#3Great read ...totally opp view of my current thinking about self ...“it’s important to think of the project as going forward, rather than thinking that I and everyone else are in the grip of a mysterious force that’s controlling us and we need to voyage inward to find it. It’s just an unconstructive direction to be looking inward instead of outward. A forward-looking approach to our lives is the positive benefit.”
Re: Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
#4This looks like it amounts to an indirect endorsement of therapeutic modalities like somatic experiencing.
I just hope that it doesn't get spun the wrong way. We may not have unconscious "thought", but we certainly do have unconscious "feeling". I haven't read the book (and didn't read the whole interview), but I hope it makes this distinction.
Re: Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
#5Not sure what to think of this yet, but it is refreshing to have an interesting new angle on the brain. This guy reminds me of Marvin Minsky, who once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge."
Re: Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
#6This looks like it amounts to an indirect endorsement of therapeutic modalities like somatic experiencing. I just hope that it doesn't get spun the wrong way. We may not have unconscious "thought", but we certainly do have unconscious "feeling". I haven't read the book (and didn't read the whole interview), but I hope it makes this distinction.
I agree with this. I had a heightened degree of anxiety the other day and I wasn't sure why. I'm sure there's a reason, but I couldn't process it. It was completely different than the way I've experienced an awareness of my own emotions my entire life. Always in relation to social environment. Now I seem to just get anxiety over bugs in code. Emotionally connected to my computer. Life is an experience, always new awarenesses to be experienced.
I still don't think there's anything permanent about the functioning of the mind. I think the things one decides to be true that one is allowed to believe are true to the individual are the things that are the most important.
There can be subconscious thought. I've experienced that. There can also be no unconscious thought. I've experienced that.
Theory of mind, always a very tricky subject! Epistomology, cognitive science, theories of intelligence.
Re: Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
#7Reminds of Viktor Frank’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Don’t make things unnecessarily complex. Instead of trying find a problems from the past in your unconscious mind and fix, find yourself something to live for. Look forward, not backwards.
Re: Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
#8I was thinking about this recently—given how difficult it is to explain "why" an artificial neural network behaves a certain way, it's probably similarly difficult for our conscious minds to explain our unconscious behavior, the best they can do is pattern match and tell stories. From the article: "If we could understand the processes by which billions of neurons cooperate to help us recognize a face or interpret a f…
I speculated that if we make substantial progress in the field of explainability research, we will be able to learn something new about human consciousness.
Re: Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
#9"What happens is not what happens. What happens is the story that we tell ourselves about what happens."
A contrived example:
Adult is home with parents. One of the parents asks her to clean up her dishes. She reacts quickly with a knee-jerk "I was going to do it! Ugh!".
What happened was that the parents wanted to clean up the table.
However, since the adult has this shifting narrative in her head about 'my parents don't treat me with respect', she immediately interpreted the simple request as proof or evidence that 'they are not treating me with respect' and emotionally reacted. Kind of like a vicious circle.
It's kind of like when we have a bad day, we can interpret it as everything is conspiring against us. The thing is that we are interpreting what happens to us all the time. It doesn't have to be a single origin story/root cause like the author of the book in the article states.
The way to look forward is to actually start taking proactive actions towards the story that you want. Since we don't exist without other people, you cannot simply spit affirmations into a mirror or make a vision board. You must put it out there with the people who are entangled in your reality. For the adult in this example, it would be something like being honest with her parents (something like non-violent communication) and telling them how she feels they are treating her without respect and working with them to "co-create" a new reality.
Note: This is not my thought. It comes from a personal development organization that starts with 'L' and ends with the letter before 'l'. The extent of my involvement was going to a weekend seminar on invitation from a friend.
Re: Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
#10Not sure what to think of this yet, but it is refreshing to have an interesting new angle on the brain. This guy reminds me of Marvin Minsky, who once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge."
That's probably not wrong. How else would you describe a 3 pound lump of fat whose job is to make sure you don't choke on your own saliva?