"it's all funny computer weighting shit"...

...was what was written on msx's blog. And I happened to strongly disagree. In fact, I disagreed so much that I ended up writing my own "blog post" going over my own ideas, which you can see below.
In retrospect, I believe it's amazing that two random persons can have ideas on the world that are this opposite. You should read the blog post in question at msx.horse/blog.php?b=blog%2F2022_10_25.nfo. To be completely honest, their post is from 2022 (this was written in 2024) and wasn't one per se, but "excerpts from a conversation". In no way was it intended to be a proper blog post. I have no doubt that they would have many arguments to put on the table in addition to what they decided to show. I wrote this because they made me think and question myself. Well, in the end, debates about the "essence" of humans bring forth more opinions than facts.
Plus, my ideas are a bit... out there (or stupidly irrelevant? I'm no philosopher). Just bear with me here.

Msx's vision of the inner workings of the brain is completely binary; a huge network of TRUE and FALSE signals that would ultimately be what's behind our reasoning as animals. Whatever flows through our heads, be it thoughts, memories or hesitations, could be boiled down to an extremely complicated reaction of gates that in the end determines our actions.

I find this way of thinking utterly insane. But this isn't what made me decide to take the time to put my thoughts on (e-)paper. It was this:

"what we perceive as gradated is a massive 3d [a physical abstraction of 4d, probably] graph of dithering, an actually unfathomably complicated plot of yes/no gates. literally everything is black and white, it's just that the bird's eye view of it forms shades of grey that we smooth over to make it easier to understand."

I believe this logic to be completely backwards: it isn't the infinity of yes/no gates that appear as shades of gray the further we zoom out, it is the infinity of shades that are abstracted away into simple answers, in this example, ones and zeroes. Abstractions are necessary if we want to make any use of the world surrounding us (how could we possibly create computers based on an infinity of values instead of bits). But simply because we can create a neural network which produces output that looks human enough based on ones and zeroes, does not mean that humans are at their core also based on some binary code, much less the universe. Moreover, I don't think that the very concept of binary exists in nature until a certain level of abstraction has been reached, meaning its essence is made from "things" likely completely different.

Wanting everything to boil down to yes/no answers is useful when you want to know wether you should fight or flee, or more recently, wether you should buy or sell your stocks, but our nature cannot be broken down to such simple building blocks simply because the end result looks oddly similar. Autistic people, as msx says, think "more like computers", but this by no means says that their representation of the world and how their brain works is somehow more down to earth than allistic people. One could argue the opposite: some autists have a harder time navigating our world because it is not black and white.

I believe the answer to be "simple". We just don't have any clue of how the mind works. Is noticing patterns in its inner workings or reading waves on an EEG enough to "get" why we are "here", right now? We therefore cannot make statements such as "we can think in if/else statements, so this must mean we are like computers, end of story". This, I believe, is merely scratching the surface of an immensely more difficult and still unanswered question: What are we?

Animals, sure. Biological machines born from natural selection(?), sure. Sometimes, beings which (try to) make rational decisions, sure. But that isn't what I'm talking about.