Our shared subconscious
„What I cannot create, I do not understand“
Richard Feynman
If you ever took hallucinogenic drugs (like LSD) in you life or had a psychotic episode, you know that the hallucinations you experience are extremely realistic. Hallucinated objects cast shadows and obey the laws of physics very accurately. They seem to be a deep part of the reality we experience under drugs. They are not a mere primitive overlay to the perceived reality. This must mean that the reality we perceive also without drugs is somehow synthesized by our brain. This sounds very strange but makes a lot of sense if we think a bit longer about it: learning means to develop a condensed (simplified) representation or description of the world. For instance if we look at a football, the eye will send millions of pixels to the brain. But the brain will convert this raw information to something much simpler: the position, the size and the color of the ball. This simplified description is the information we act on. The pixel image from the eye contains just too much information to process.
The only way to verify that this condensed representation is valid (without having an outside teacher who tells you if it is good or bad) is to reconstruct the reality from the condensed representation and compare it to the „real“ observed reality. Learning means, to update the condensed representation from the observed differences between the two realities. In the example this would mean that a pixel image is drawn from the footballs condensed representation (position, size, color) and this image is then compared to the pixels from the eye. The differences in the pixels can be used to optimize the condensed representation of the ball (learning).
Therefore learning without at teacher always means that a synthetic variant of reality needs to be constructed. But why do we perceive the synthesized variant and not the „real“ one (in the sense that we experience this reality)? The real one must be more accurate than the one generated from the condensed representation. But it seems that this improved accuracy is in fact useless, because the real world is in partial conflict with the learned variant (because of the imperfections of the latter). Our perception would be sometimes in contradiction to our learned (simplified) version of the world. This could be very confusing.
We must live in the world as we understand it, otherwise we cannot act effectively.
(Image by author)
This means that everything you see, touch, smell or hear is in fact „made up“ by your brain. The part of the brain which contains your conscious mind is not directly connected to the sensors of your body (eyes, ears etc.) but only to a highly complex perception system. The „Matrix“ idea, that the world you live in is generated by a computer, is true. This „computer“ is the perception system of your brain.
So in a way you are alone in your own world. The people you meet are products of your brain. Of course, most probably there exists a „real“ reality which served as a model for your inner reality. The other people do really exist. But, as we will see, the consequences of this insight are very important to understand yourself.
Note that our agreement of this reality is very high. It seems we all create more or less the same one internally.
What happens if you meet other people? It is, for many reasons, very important to be able to predict other peoples behavior. For instance if humans hunt a mammoth together, it is very important to know what other people are going to do next. What the brain does, it queries an inner model of this other people to find out how they are going to behave. This inner model is actually you (!) plus some modifications which take into account the personality of the person which should be predicted. Therefore you are in a way all these people! Of course you have a very unique character and your behavior differs from that of other people. Therefore the inner model of all humans is constrained by the parameters of your character when the brain calculates how you should act. The important thing is that the basis for your model of other people is the model of yourself. Therefore if you believe that you are despicable, you will consider other people to be despicable. This is why it is so important to forgive, to see that we are all innocent. If you forgive yourself, you almost automatically also forgive others.
It also means that concepts can be transferred quite fast from person to person, even without talking. For instance we are often able to predict what a person is going say next.
„We despise the others so terribly, we are so terrified from their victories, because we meet our own demons in triumph in them“
„Wir verachten die anderen so wahnsinnig, wir sind so entsetzt über ihre Siege, weil uns in ihnen unsere eigenen Dämonen im Triumph begegnen"
Alard von Kittlitz