Spencer and Jeff explore neuroscience’s "model in the brain" theory, where consciousness relies on a constructed virtual reality—explaining hallucinations as fabricated insertions. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum highlights the uncertainty of others' perceptions, while personal biases (e.g., assuming traits from limited evidence) skew trust and tribal instincts. Unconscious generalizations, like projecting negativity or suspicion tied to insecurities, reveal how flawed mental shortcuts shape interactions. The episode suggests our understanding of reality—and even others’ minds—may be more illusion than fact, raising unsettling questions about perception’s fragility. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I'm here today with Jeff.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Not too bad, buddy.
How about you?
Pretty good.
Just a reminder.
Anyone who wants to send any feedback and remind us that we're wrong about something?
Actually, we've been wrong about a couple of things as we went along.
I've actually found I'm full of shit on a regular basis.
So, like, please.
Right.
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That email gets sent to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Today, we're going to get into a little bit of neuroscience.
You ever took neuroscience in college, Jeff?
Hard nobody.
I will admit that we are completely out of my experience base on this one.
Right.
Well, I also did not take neuroscience in college, but that doesn't matter.
We're all amateurs here at everything we do.
So, I want to talk about the model in the brain.
Now, this is really interesting to me.
I mean, it's a very simple concept.
I believe it's fairly rudimentary in neuroscience circles, at least from podcasts and that sort of thing that I listen to.
They talk about it a lot.
It seems to be fairly common knowledge among people who do research in this area.
It's a very complicated thing and how it occurs, but the concept itself is fairly simple.
So, you have what's called consciousness.
I know you do because you wouldn't be thinking about anything if you didn't.
So, you have part of your brain that's essentially the conscious part of your mind.
And you are seeing things and you're hearing things and you're experiencing, you know, you're touching a table or a mouse or keyboard or whatever.
And those sensations are linking up in time with the things you're hearing and the things you're seeing.
And all of that is information getting sent to the conscious part of your mind.
And you interpret that first, your simple interpretation is that those things are just like hardwired, all the information getting sent to the conscious part of your mind, which is a control center.
And then you're making decisions.
And then that decision is coming out to tell your body what to do.
You see you're playing catch with someone and you see a ball and you're making a decision to move your hand in such a way as to catch that ball.
That's the sort of thing.
But it doesn't really happen that way because I didn't study neuroscience.
I'm not in a position to tell you why exactly I know it doesn't happen that way, but I know by listening to enough people, it doesn't really happen that way.
Instead, what happens is all that information from your eyes and your ears and all the sensory organs you have all gets sent to a different part of the brain, like a processing unit.
And that part builds a virtual world.
And that virtual world is cobbled together into an image.
That image is fed into the conscious part of your brain.
Now, at first, you might think, what the hell is the difference?
Who cares?
Right.
Well, this, this would explain, like clinically and medically explain how hallucinations are produced.
Well, yes, exactly right.
I mean, part of the research that goes into finding out what exactly hallucinations are is part of how they discover this in the first place.
That one part of your brain is essentially talking to a different part of your brain.
And the conscious part of your brain is only one portion.
And that there's a different part that's doing all kinds of other things.
And, you know, I say a different part as if there's only two parts, but there's hundreds of different little parts of your brain.
Right.
And they are giving information to the conscious part of your mind.
And this model is being constructed.
So the thing you, you are seeing things, but you're not really seeing anything.
you're seeing a model of the thing.
Okay.
So we have that concept.
It's, you know, we didn't need to go to college for neuroscience to get that.
That's, that's fine.
This creates a couple different things.
So not all the information from your body, from the senses, is being put into the model.
Some things are left out.
It's possible that you're itchy in some spots, but you don't notice it all the time.
It's possible for a person to be, for example, hallucinating, and that hallucination can be based on taking some kind of chemical, or it could be based on a neurological condition they have.
Many of us watched a big movie that was big in the year it came out.
It was called A Beautiful Mind.
Spoilers for that movie, but there are hallucinations that the main character experiences in that movie.
That's exactly how those hallucinations occur in the mind of a person like the main character in that show, is that your brain can create a model of a person and insert it into the model it's giving you of the world you're looking at.
You can imagine that you're in a war zone when you're not even in any war zone at all.
All kinds of things can happen in this space.
And it leads to a lot of weirdness for a lot of reasons.
A lot of people think, well, is anything real?
Is the whole world a simulation in our brains?
Is it there's a philosophical problem that is created from the idea that five centuries from now, psychologists have the ability to insert the sensations directly into your brain and give you the image, the idea that you're seeing things that you're not really seeing.
And in fact, give you an entire experience, which is essentially, of course, the Matrix.
But of course, when the philosophical question was asked, it was before the Matrix movie came out.
Also central to total recall.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
And so I believe the philosophical question at the time asks all kinds of other things about how can you know that anything is real if it's possible that someone inserts an entirely unreal thing into your brain.
René Descartes is one of my most cherished historical people.
I've read a lot of things that were written by him.
Well, I didn't read the things he wrote.
I read the translation of the things he wrote, but still he was a giant of a philosopher in his time.
And he attempted to tackle this problem of is anything real?
I mean, he sort of, he didn't know that the brain was only having a model inside it, but he knew that there was a problem with the idea that thinking someone else was conscious because there's no test.
There's no way to know that anyone else is really conscious.
So he thought about this for, I don't know how long he thought, really sat down to think about it, presumably a very long time.
And then he wrote an essay in which he came up with the conclusion in Latin, cogito ergo sum, which means I think, therefore, I am.
This has been one of the most celebrated or communicated phrases in philosophy of all time.
I think, therefore, I am.
It's been misinterpreted a thousand different ways.
But really, he was attempting to say, what is real?
But once it really came down to it, the only thing he could know for certain was real was himself.
He couldn't be sure that anyone else was real.
He didn't have the concept of anyone else being a robot or any kind of, you know, complex AI that mimics humans.
And he didn't really think that anyone else was, but he still knew the limits of everything he could know.
He could not be sure that anyone else was conscious, just himself.
And I think that's a very interesting thing.
So we have a model of our world, and that model includes other people in it.
Yeah.
You know, I have a model of my world.
And in my world, you as a person named Jeff exists.
And you have a model of your world in your brain.
And in that world, you have a person named Spencer who exists.
And I don't confuse you with other people because I know you're separate from the other people I know.
Yeah.
And that seems really rudimentary and basic, but it is, it is necessary for what happens next, which is that my model of you is necessarily incomplete because I am not you.
I mean, that's, that's, again, very, very basic.
But in order to create something like a complete model of you, I have to use pieces from another model.
And the only other model I have is you, is the model for me.
So I start by in attempting to know you, Jeff, the things I don't know about you, the gaps in the model of you are filled in with the things that I think about myself.
Yeah.
So if I've never seen you do something really basic, like let's say I've never seen you whistle, but I know how to whistle and it was pretty easy to learn.
I'm probably going to think that you probably know something about whistling.
Yeah.
Because I do.
And the same is true for a lot of things.
If whistling was very, very difficult, I might not think that you necessarily knew how to do it.
But all kinds of things like this are filled in.
And once you know a lot of them, once you know a large number of people, these models slur together.
You come to realize that people of the same type tend to be like each other.
And then instead of using, it's more complicated at that point.
Instead of using parts of your own model to fill in the gaps in another person's model, you're using parts of other people's models to fill in those gaps.
Yeah, exactly.
And of course, what makes it even more complicated than that is that, let's say I know a person named, I'm going to call them Mark because we did that before, a guy named Mark that we don't know.
I actually don't know anyone named Mark.
But the things I think about Mark, he's like a person I know named Jeff.
And I used in my mind parts of the model that I have of Jeff to make up the gaps I know in the model of Mark.
But of course, again, the model of Jeff was partly filled in by things of myself.
So there's this other level.
It gets really, really sticky.
Well, I mean, like there's address the elephant in the room, man, like there's a lot of this that just comes off as straight up prejudice or bigotry or racism.
Like if you are a person who is prone to think judgmentally of a person of another race or culture, you know, about whatever, driving, who cares, and you meet another person of that culture, if you're of that personality type to make those kind of generalizations, you'll assume that about that person.
But like, even outside of that, like as you gain more life experience and interact with more, you know, other consciousnesses that you take on assumption exist, Like you said, you sort of learn more playbooks like mirrors of comparison to hold up to fill in intel on other people until you learn more about them.
Because I think it's natural for us to want to sort of classify and categorize people.
It helps us know them.
And we want to know them, I think.
So like if I met somebody, for example, on the street and in casual conversation learned that, you know, they attended the Phoenix Theater Department at the University of Victoria.
Well, I would immediately have a whole bunch of suppositions about who that person is and how they would react to a number of scenarios, just based on the fact that I personally attended that school and met a lot of people there.
So I built a model in my head of what a Phoenix theater alum looks like.
If they told me they worked construction, I have worked construction for a decade and a half now.
I have a lot of generalizations about what that culture looks like.
So I would have a lot of assumptions about the kind of person they were.
A lot of it, like you say, you just draw from your own life experience and other people like that person you've met.
But it's important to note that like a lot of that is pure conscious or unconscious supposition.
It's not based on any real evidence of that person's behavior.
It's pure extrapolation.
And a lot of times you can be really friggin wrong.
Yeah.
We generally call this generalization, right?
And of course, we see this oftentimes as a negative thing.
And you're right when we're, especially when we're wrong.
And in some cases, it's incredibly unfair.
It can be very negative.
But it's also something that we can't avoid.
If you meet someone, let's say you have to call someone on the phone and you talk to someone on the phone.
You might make a model of them in your brain.
And that model is probably going to have two arms, two legs, all 10 fingers.
You're probably not thinking about it too much about exactly their shape.
But if you were forced to conjure a shape in your head of that person, it would probably have all those things.
It's probably not going to be a picture in your head of a head in a jar, futuramisty, right?
Because you've never met anyone who's just a head in a jar.
And you've met almost everyone that you've met has two arms, two legs, all 10 fingers, et cetera.
If you lived in a world where it was very, very common to have been missing fingers or limbs, you might make a different picture in your brain of the person you only met on the phone.
And that's just from the experiences you have with your world.
That's exactly where it sits.
It's impossible for us to feel that we know anyone else unless we're doing this, unless we're trying to fill in the blanks in the model we have of them with the other models we have in our brain.
There's an upward limit to the number of people we can even be said that we feel that we know.
It's a different number for each person, but there is an upper limit.
We don't have unlimited capacity for this.
And part of the thing that allows that number to scale upward is this process of generalization that we do.
We have models in our brains of people.
And that's just how the brain is doing this.
But again, I think it's not just about models.
It's also about like categorization, which I think probably harkens back to a more instinctual like tribe-seeking behavior.
Like, you know, we have my wife and I have a circle of friends that are like without exception, fellow parents of children within spitting distance of the same age.
And it's, it's a pretty tight group.
I consider myself to be very close friends with most of the people in this group.
And in any emergency situation with my kids, say, like, say my kid gets hurt at school and I'm stuck out of town working and I need someone to go and pick them up, like no hesitation, any parent on that list I would call.
Like they're in that onion layer of my clan, right?
That I would, I would trust them with my children's safety.
I also have a fairly large circle of friends that I consider myself also to be incredibly loyal to and tight with that I've met through the building trades and service work.
A lot of them are bachelors or like in like fairly new committed relationships, like no children on the table yet.
Not all of them are necessarily younger than me.
This is just where these people are at in their life.
And while I consider them to be a equally close group of friends, you know, the model I have in my brain for them slots them into a very different category than the friends that also have children.
Sure.
Like emergency situation probably wouldn't lean on any of those guys with my kids.
Yeah.
Right.
And a lot of this generalizations that I think you're talking about, where we sort of fill in the missing genetic data of our perception of the other person's consciousness, fill in our data on the other person's, our perception of the other person's consciousness comes from a desire to classify a fellow tribesperson.
I think it's related to another thing that I haven't talked about a lot, probably should have, which is really the concept of trust.
When you're describing this to me as different tribes, all of this to me relates to the concept of that you would trust each of the people in these different tribes, essentially, with different things.
Some of them you would trust with your children.
Others you would trust with work-related things, right?
Like that's.
And part of this is a way for your brain to more easily and more efficiently categorize who you would trust with what to fully accomplish everything you need to accomplish, right?
To me, trust is at the root of almost all of the things that we would want to do with our interaction with the world at large.
We need to trust all the people around us.
We need to have some level of trust just with the world itself in the idea that wherever we are, we're going to continue to exist and that all the people close to us that we care about are going to continue to exist.
Otherwise, if we're in a spot that's about to get covered in a landslide, well, then we should move away from that spot to a different spot that's not about to get buried in a landslide.
If there's cougars nearby, we need to do something about those cougars or move to a new spot that doesn't have cougars.
That's a thing that was part of our prehistory.
Yeah.
And probably even before we were ever human.
I mean, it's likely that this loop was present in all the mammals and even all the birds and all the other animals too.
This idea that what does a lizard see?
You know, is a lizard conscious?
Is a lizard able to form a model of its own body?
Probably, right?
It moves in the world.
And then what does it think when it sees other lizards?
Does it recognize them as another creature that has its own model?
And then does it make, you know, what kind of decisions does a lizard make?
It must be very simple, but.
And at what level down the food chain does consciousness break down so that it's no longer statistically significant as consciousness.
Yeah.
Interesting rabbit hole, but I think it might be pulling us off topic a hair.
Yeah, maybe.
I think one of the things that it's important to recognize too with this whole sort of filling in the blanks with models of character behavior that you either draw from generalizations based on other individuals like that that you've met before, or more frequently from your own personal philosophical or moral character.
What would you do in that situation?
I suppose that person would do the same.
Right.
Is the idea of we always seem to react with the most rancor to negative personality traits in other people that we ourselves are guilty of.
And like they actually call that projection, right?
Right.
Which I think is pretty much precisely what you're talking about is like not just in the negative connotation of projecting your own negative personality traits on other people, but projecting parts of your personality or your consciousness into the void of what you don't know about the consciousness of the person across the table from you.
You're completing the model of the other person with things about yourself that, and those things are things that you would recognize as not useful or not good.
Yeah.
Right.
And it might not even be that you wouldn't find them not good, but that if you thought that everyone around you would think they were not good, you might want to virtue signal that they were not good in that way, that you recognize, you know, this, this human is stepping outside the social bounds in this way, right?
And hope that no one thinks about why you know that.
Right.
I mean, that's, that's always the interesting thing.
Or why you're so interested in pointing it out so we can all heap ire on them for it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
On them, them over there.
There's those people doing that bad thing.
There's an expression that was, I think it's probably still very prevalent in a lot of circles that the person who is cheating on a spouse or their girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever is the one most likely to be suspicious of their other cheating on them.
Yeah.
And that's, I think this is exactly part of this is that that's just one example, but this is a microcosm and you have you don't know enough about the other person to know everything they're going to think.
Obviously, you don't even know enough to know everything you're going to think.
Let's just be honest about that too.
And so your insecurities inevitably leak into what you're creating in your mind about the other person.
And there's no way around that.
Yeah, for sure.
So anyway, I think maybe we should just cut that where it is.
I think that's a good point to tie that off with that thought.