Post by Josephine Cheng on Jul 13, 2016 20:27:39 GMT
1. The Virtual Simulation Theory of Consciousness is an idea based off the acknowledgement that humans are the only species aware of our own awareness. “Consciousness is a fantastic virtual simulator and because of its inclusivity and insular engineering it has an inherent tendency to believe its own machinations as exterior to itself and not as the byproduct of its own interiority” (Is the Universe an App, 75). To draw an example, Gerald Edelman contrasts human psychology with that of animals. Animals think very “presently” meaning that they live only within their current state and situation and do not have consciousness of past or future. For example, a squirrel will think to itself to run because it senses predators flying above preparing to hunt for prey, but a squirrel won’t think to itself, “Remember when we ran from that eagle the other day? Boy, was that scary.” Edelman says that humans are “conscious of being conscious” and as the only species capable of doing so, gives us an “evolutionary advantage” that has made our species so powerful.
2. The brain does play mind tricks on us, but we have benefited from it as a species because it has pushed mankind to progress significantly more quickly than any other species. “Although we experience the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just a series of outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field.” Ray Kurzweil describes the process of the brain deceiving us as us “[hallucinating] the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of movies with very low data rates that arrive in parallel channels.” (105) Although these “hallucinatory” associations might not necessarily be the truth and merely our truth, the human ability to make these judgment or predictions have established our species pivotal survival tactics.
2. The brain does play mind tricks on us, but we have benefited from it as a species because it has pushed mankind to progress significantly more quickly than any other species. “Although we experience the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just a series of outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field.” Ray Kurzweil describes the process of the brain deceiving us as us “[hallucinating] the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of movies with very low data rates that arrive in parallel channels.” (105) Although these “hallucinatory” associations might not necessarily be the truth and merely our truth, the human ability to make these judgment or predictions have established our species pivotal survival tactics.