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

...was what was written on msx's blog. This is a rewrite of a rewrite of a document I'd written about the blog post in question, available at msx.horse/blog.php?b=blog%2F2022_10_25.nfo.

It's actually kind of funny: I was quite a bit angered by their blog post the first time I read it, but the more I rewrite this document, the more I find their way of seeing ourselves as... pretty darn accurate. Nowadays I only reject the "mind as binary" part, which may seem like the whole theory, but to me, it doesn't actually feel like much. In any case, this document feels like nitpicking but I still want to leave it up as it's been on this website in one way or another for a little while now.

To be more precise, their blog post isn't one per se, rather "excerpts from a conversation". Views are never as nicely fleshed out as in a proper blog post.

Msx's vision of the inner workings of the brain is completely binary; a huge network of yes or no gates that would ultimately be behind our reasoning as animals. Whatever flows through our heads, be it thoughts, memories or hesitations, could be boiled down to an extremely complicated chain reaction of those gates that in the end determines our actions.

Taken directly from the post:

"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."

That's interesting. I don't think it's a problem that there's no proof to back this up as it's the same story with every other theory trying to explain our existence (e.g. religions). Still, I wouldn't pick this if I were to choose a theory to believe in:

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. For me, we are not an infinity of yes/no gates appearing as shades of gray the further we zoom out, rather a blob of... something... abstracted away into simple answers. Using computers as an example, they only exist because they abstract the world into two values, 0 and 1. If msx says that we came out of zeroes and ones, computers prove that the inverse is possible, too. If the process works both ways, then ain't no way I'm gonna believe that "yeah, those little concepts we've created called true and false are actually what constitutes us", when the exact opposite, which feels way more intuitive to me, works just as well.

This is why we, or nature, should not be so easily broken down to such simple building blocks just because the output of an AI looks oddly human. Autistic people, as msx says, think "more like computers", but of course this by no means says that their impression of the world is somehow more down to earth than that of allistic people. One can argue the opposite: A lot of autists have a harder time living in our world because it is not black and white.

Of course, all I said only applies to me. I can't say anything for anyone else because I'll never think like an autist and an autist will never think like me. The only place I'll ever live in is my own representation of the world. However, that representation doesn't involve bits.

It's true that comparing ourselves to bits may feel dehumanizing to some. But the feeling probably stems from the fact that we all believe we're special in some way or another, and the idea of the mind as a series of bits comes challenging that belief. If we didn't care about that, we'd probably have no problem with that representation of the human mind. Though I still believe that it has a few holes, at least in the way it's presented.

Holy bananas, this has absolutely no structure...