Hypotheticals, Ai
My Current Model of The Mind (2024)
I’ve been trying to come up with a model of how my mind works that incorporates the things I know, and the things I suspect are true.
This will evolve as I experience new things and change my beliefs, but I thought I would document my current best guess.
I think of my mind in layers, like an onion.
The center is pure awareness. I am aware of typing this article, right now. That awareness doesn’t really have an opinion on things, it is sort of just sitting in the movie theater of reality, taking in whatever is happening.
The next layer is my conscience. It does think, and have opinions. It attempts to influence the surrounding layers, but sometimes isn’t successful.
The pure awareness and conscience are the non-physical aspects of my mind. I think this is what survives death.
These plug into the physical brain. I think the brain is basically a biological computer. Some people say that it is like a radio, but I think this is a bad analogy. I think of it more like an AI. It has separate thoughts from the conscience, and is reactionary.
The brain is designed to live in this physical world. It creates the ego, which is the next layer. The ego is what we typically think we are, but that’s just because we spend so much time there.
Outside the ego is the subconscious. The subconscious is our autopilot. When we form habits, they get programmed into our subconscious, in order to be played back. It is 100% reactionary – it takes in sensor information, and outputs behavior.
Then finally, we have our body (arms, legs, etc), and the rest of the physical world (houses, cars, etc).
Some things I haven’t quite figured out:
What is will power? It feels like exerting our will is when an inner layer tries to influence an outer layer. That could be the ego influencing the subconscious (learning to play guitar), or the conscience influencing the ego (telling ourselves not to say something mean in the middle of a fight).
What is attention? Is it separate from awareness, or does it just direct awareness? I don’t know what attention is. Or is it a capability of awareness – i.e., the way awareness influences the conscience..? I don’t know.
The question I’m trying to answer is why do I need to put my body to sleep in order to have an out of body experience (OBE)? Why can’t I just disconnect right now, and fly around? And what is so special about sleep that allows me to leave my body?
Also, I would like to understand where the dream vs OBE distinction comes from.
When I fall asleep, my sensory information becomes garbled and eventually overcome by the dream world. If I maintain awareness during this transition, I can reject the dream world, and leave my body instead. Or I can accept the dream world, and have a lucid dream, completely able to control it. Or if I lose awareness entirely (which is what usually happens), I will be sucked into the dream world, and not be aware that I’m dreaming.
Another puzzle is how does deep sleep fit into all of this? It’s not like we are always dreaming – we only dream a fraction of our time asleep. What are we doing when we lose awareness entirely? Time just jumps ahead.
Also, where is memory stored? Perhaps in multiple layers. Memory is a mystery.
Anyways, these are my current thoughts, thanks for listening!