We(humans) are just machine learning models
I arrived at this conclusion, while I was observing my pet Cat named “ Fluffy”. Fluffy would do whatever he can, but it cannot do anything which he can’t. Sounds funny eh? , but this thought pierced me like a nail and shook me to the core. It wasn’t as if I never knew it, but it just hit me harder at that moment. And then my thoughts snowballed in to further analysis of where do we stand as humans compared to a Cat and following questions were standing in front of me with brick and bat.
Are we really free or are we continuously programmed ?
Are we really free?
Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris argues that free will is an illusion. In his view, we are the mere conscious witnesses of decisions that deep in our brains have already been taken. Any decision you think you may have made was simply an illusion. It was hard for me to digest this fact and it compelled me to read the book by Sam Harris.
He argued that every decision which we take is CAUSED based on an earlier event and by the time the conscious mind is aware of that decision, we feel as if we took it, but it gets taken by the subconscious mind or the higher mind, before we even realize that it was taken by us. This is a one heck of a finding and baffling enough for sure. I started pondering about this whole life & existence as a circus. What exactly is happening on this planet? Are we just dancing to the tune and music of something which we have no control ? How is that even possible or even conceivable? It turns out that , he may be right , but I had my doubts on his observations. More on that in separate article. However, lets conclude that the free will is driven by our past experiences and recordings of this physical world by our subconscious mind. In a way, our mind is consuming data and learning a lot of things about ourselves including our choices, our likings etc.
Are we continuously programmed ?
For non-techies , just to give some context of what programmed means. It basically means feeding instructions for a particular outcome. Yes, that’s how simply I can make it. Programming is not limited to machines. Even humans can get programmed and we are getting programmed day in day out without our control as well.
We(humans) are born with a basic level of intelligence or with a “programmed” machine which knows how to function i.e to breathe, cry, walk, move our hands etc. We do not need to learn these things. This program is baked in to us generations after generations and hard wired in to our DNA, so that the whole evolution purpose is not lost. If there would be no memory of our past learnings, Evolution will fail. The basis of evolution is to make incremental progress over what exists and pass on the genes to the next generation.
After birth, our environment starts getting registered in our brain. We observe things , process it and build a model out of it. When we look at a tree — We register it as a tree and a program has been done or so to say a memory has been fed. Memory is just the instruction. Its the brain which can read the memory and make sense of it like a processor.
In this whole process, our brain is just acting as a machine learning algorithm. A typical machine learning algorithm ingests lot of data and then makes sense of the data. The machine — brain here is capable of making sense of data and arrive at conclusions. The training data pours in continuously from our external environment and our sub conscious mind makes conclusions and stores this information without intervention of conscious mind.
Quiz question — We made lot of progress in Science & Technology, but is there anything which we have discovered/imagined which does not already exists ?
Aeroplanes ? Flying as a concept is not new. Birds fly. All we did was make technology to fly objects.
Mobile phones? As a concept, making our voices heard from long distance is not new. All we did was stretch this idea to make the distance farther.
TV ? Idea of TV is to again stretch the idea of viewing something happening remotely or just playing back.
Our imagination is limited to the things which have been fed to our brains from our external environments.
Even the aliens which we show in movies are nothing but representations of our mind with 2 eyes or 4 eyes , one head , many limbs because at the basic level — we just know that a living being has eyes, hands etc.
Take any other example for that matter and you will be shocked to accept the fact that we cannot think of anything unfathomable which hasn’t been in our experience before. There is no original thought. There could be just variations of it.
This brings me to the final conclusion — We are at the end of the day — Just a machine learning algorithm which is consuming data and churning out conclusions which we call knowledge/experience. Originality of thought is only limited to how one crafts a different variations from the basic building blocks of our knowledge. A Writer writes a great new story based on the ingredients of drama, humor, tragedy, poetic etc. which are inherently part of every person already.
As scary, it may sound, but the saying “ you become, what you think ” is very apt. The subconscious mind is an unlawful register which will consume whatever is thrown at it. Beware of what you think & consume on daily basis. You don’t have any control over it. Some yogic practices is said to make your mind so alert and conscious that you can actually manage this unlawful register to cherry pick what you need to be registered. It requires great deal of practice of mindfulness. More on this later.
Hope you enjoyed the thoughts presented and it tinkled a curiosity in you !!
