Mindful Thoughts

Minds are tricky things. We spend our whole lives with complete access to one, and yet their inner workings remain mysterious. I'm going to talk about some of my thoughts on what makes up a human-like mind. Wikipedia lists several mental faculties found in minds. These include:

• Thought: the ability to process and manipulate ideas. Includes reasoning, problem solving, and decision making.
• Memory: the ability to record thoughts and experiences. This includes both long and short-term memory.
• Imagination: the ability to think about things that aren't real and to create such thoughts at will.
• Consciousness: the ability to do these things while simultaneously observing that one's doing them. Being aware of one's own agency and forming an identity.

So how do all these things fit together? Well, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? It's not something well-understood by anyone, let alone someone with only casual knowledge like myself. However, I do have some thoughts. Common coding theory says that perceptions and actions are linked. Supporting this, mirror neurons fire both when we perform an action and when we witness it. I think this is the link between perception, thought, action, and imagination.

When we observe an action, we also observe the effects. If we can figure out how to duplicate the effects ourselves, the observed action becomes an imaginary action. Actually executing the action makes it a real action. The idea is that all of these are essentially the same thing. They all take place in a sort of mental play space.

Observation loads information into this play space in the form of short term memories. Here, we can think about what we've observed and, knowing our own capabilities, simulate doing it ourselves. Note that this step can go awry, as happens no matter how many times I see this trick. However, if you aren't completely mystified, you can then replace the memory in your play space with a simulation of doing it yourself. If and when you decide to actually perform the action, it's simply a matter duplicating the imagined action in the real world. If our understanding of the action is incorrect, this step can also go wrong, as it does when I actually try performing the shirt trick. But if it doesn't go wrong, then our understanding of the action is reinforced.

Here's the kicker though. The mental play space isn't limited to physical actions. We can also observe/imagine abstract actions, like addition and multiplication. Sympathy/Empathy would correspond to imagining/performing emotive actions. Doing these things is essentially just a simulation of things we've previously observed, modified to suit our current thoughts.

You can imagine eating something that you've already eaten. You can also imagine eating something you've never eaten, because you can use the first experience to simulate the second. There are lots of studies that indicate that video games make you smarter. I would argue that video games fuel the process I've described. They let you observe novel actions that you can't normally perform, tell you how to execute them, and let you practice doing so. By observing simulations, we literally improve our own abilities to run simulations in our heads.

All of this makes the human brain sound awfully marvelous. How can it figure out how to simulate nearly any situation, even ones brand new to it? Well, to be honest, I don't think it goes quite that far. I think the mental play space is more of a general purpose simulator. The effects of simulated actions are drawn from approximated observation rather than any real, deep understanding. You might be able to figure out the trajectory of a baseball using physics and calculus, but your brain is probably not actually doing that when you catch it.

So where exactly do emotions and sentience fit into this model? I have some ideas for those too, but this post is already much longer that I intended it to be, so I will leave those for another day!