Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

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For all we know, our brain can be just an interface to something else we don't know yet. Like when nobody knew what radioactivity was, miners thought some monsters resided deep inside Earth, illuminating caves and mines in green, and anybody that got nearby died soon afterwards. Quantum theory spawned a lot of scientism at the beginning of 20th Century, attributing consciousness properties down to atomic level, and this seems to be the case with each new generation, falling into the same though a bit more refined scientistic trap.

Just for fun:

If we play with the idea of Platonic Theory of Forms as a super-set of what we can perceive with our sens-es(-ors), under assumption philosophy/math is above reality, we can simply be plugged into some kind of a virtual machine with some API of sorts (of course undocumented) that is called by our brains when we think. Those who figured out some rare API calls on their own or by a secret tradition we call magicians, conjurers, gurus, Neo etc. Maybe words/thoughts could invoke some of those API functions, hence magic Harry-Potter-esque words and generally prayers in many religions. Similarly, what we call angels could be simply API services with highly intelligent behavior, preferably operating outside time, providing verifiable and expected outcome. Demons then are some intelligent services gone completely wrong, messing up with the rest of intelligent services that depend upon them, playing eternal asynchronous byzantine generals (by e.g. trying to upgrade all services to Windows 10 or flat interfaces with telemetry /s).

I think I should write a dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi "Services and Daemons" about this ;-)

>For all we know, our brain can be just an interface to something else we don't know yet.

This is a very old, but unproven hypothesis. You might have heard of it, it's called "soul". :-)

No, it's a novel idea called SaaS - soul as a service. The OP probably is already making money on it while you sit here posting dismissive comments.

Yes, indeed. We need to assume "soul" resides in the cloud. What we don't know is the soul ID - a very secret API exists only a few soul-hackers were able to find but soon demons causing madness were unleashed on them after each intrusion was detected. So only a few chosen services know IDs, allowing them a direct access to souls in the Great Hash Map of Souls, hence why knowing a name means having a power over a soul. Of course, soul ID is innately incorporated in each individual brain itself, but encryption is too strong even for bad services to break into, unless soul allows voluntarily to be possessed by calling a secret black magic APIs. The rest of services need to perform long and tiring searches in the Great Array of Souls (GAS) and match with secondary characteristics of the soul like virtues and vices, instead of ID.

Of course, we found a novel meta-parallel way to access souls in the GAS reducing the search complexity to O(Sqrt(n)), hence we make a lot of money exposing this API externally for a fee. Do you want to make somebody lucky? Arrange a life situation that looks like magic? Any enemies that should taste fear of damnation? Please visit www.soul-as-a-service.com to know more!

What's the role of the brain if decisions are handed down from the API? Couldn't we have made due with just the spine and a few extra parts of the brain. How does it communicate to the API? Is the API vulnerable to physical effects, being linked to the brain? All these considerations have been explored thoroughly since Descartes and dualism.

Obviously there is a lot of verified intelligent behavior on neural level we know about, like image processing, 3D reconstruction & mapping, motion planning, sound recognition, voice synthesis etc. And we more-less have some simplified models like that in the form of deep learning. So imagine brain as a sensor processing engine for inputs happening in the vicinity of a person inside "Simuverse". Even computing possible actions to take and attaching some utility value of each of them or starting upon acting on the best solution found so far already. Now for the decision process to be complete, brain passes results of this computation to the API that then invokes consciousness in the "soulspace" which is of another yet unknown quality, making the decision ;-) There is some interface latency of course, so some default actions are needed by brain, but consciousness can override them within 0.5s. Brain could be seen as an equivalent of cyberspace, consciousness might be coming from another principle we aren't aware of or don't have proper scientific devices to measure yet (if that is even possible).

Remember, each age views humans differently. Previous civilizations viewed humans first as based on magic, then hydraulics, then mechanics, then electricity, now we view them via lens of information processing, as our Zeitgeist dictates. It's likely people in 100 years will be laughing at us and our stupidity (hopefully they will be more advanced and not in a dark age), after they crack more things about Universe.

Obviously, this doesn't explain phenomena like brain exhibiting multiple different persons inside for patients with schizophrenia or when connection between left and right hemisphere is broken - some experiments shown people behave like as if there were multiple persons inside fighting with each other. Perhaps a bug in the nexus when there is a hash collision somewhere? 8-)

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