Your Life Is an Algorithm, Your Brain Is an Operating System

Right at the end of college I took a philosophy course as a required gen-ed that went into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem the Mind Body problem - whether the mind is different than the brain.

And I found that it's one of the few things I think about from college constantly, like, really persistently. It's changed how I think about everything, and is close as I really get to spirituality right now. If I obsess over it long enough I start getting little panic attacks questioning what reality even means, and all sorts of other things. It makes me wish I knew people that would want to discuss this with me at a quiet diner.

I always likened the spirit to the state of a cpu, and the brain as the cpu. You could import someone else's spirit into my brain, and their reality would have my body. Someone else's memories are the way my neurons are connected, their current thoughts stored in whatever the registers to my brain are.

All of these states of my spirit can be imported into another brain and I'll be unaware. It could be possible every morning a new body is recreated for me on another planet and my state is imported into it with my memories, and I am oblivious. In fact, I could be created at any discrete instant, even just now, and be unaware.

Someone said that if we ever got technology good enough to emulate reality virtually, then the odds of us being in one are really good. That single concept sort of blew my mind. There's just so many interesting facets to this correlation between the brain, mind, and computers. I know this post isn't particularly focused on a single point but I just find it fascinating and would love to hear other people's ideas.

I believe the brain is too complex to compare to either an operating system or a CPU. We can perhaps analogize both of those artificial entities to individual functions that a human brain may perform, but they would not be comprehensive of its abilities. As just one additional ability, there's also a memory storage (both short-term and long-term) mechanism existent in the brain, perhaps akin to temporary and permanent memory in a computer. Artificial neural networks mimic the properties of biological neurons. And then there's the concept of intelligence and actually thinking and understanding (which is really much more complicated than mere processing as in terms of a CPU); while machines' abilities are more along the lines of imitation/simulation.

Newbie philosophy meets graduate of computer science.

The mind body problem is from Decarté. it's old, dead philosophy these days.

this idea was explored in Japanese cartoons in the 90s. I started asking and answering these questions when I was dealing with puberty.

I guess... what I'm getting at is... this.party has been over for more than a few years now.

Brain is rather CPU....multitasks with priority...