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Thought experiment: Is my brain also generating reality without a physics engine and is filling in details that it thinks should be there? If true, what are the

Thought experiment: Is my brain also generating reality without a physics engine and is filling in details that it thinks should be there? If true, what are the advantages/disadvantages of it?

coldpie 6y ago
Yes, absolutely. You can catch a baseball because your brain predicts where it will go before your eyes see its actual movement. This may be a good place to start learning more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
- lonelappde 6y ago
  How is that "not a physics engine"?
  - jcims 6y ago
    It's more general than a physics engine in that it's predicting an expected outcome...it just so happens that the outcome here is largely dictated by physics. (At some level they all are but some more obviously than others)
  - contravariant 6y ago
    It's ridiculously bad at modelling quickly rotating objects.
- the_af 6y ago
  Another fun example of how your brain predicts physics stuff is when you misjudge what something weighs. For example, if you subconsciously judge a glass is full of water but it's actually empty, as you try to lift it your arm will fly up awkwardly. This all happens without conscious thought. Don't tell me it never happened to you!
  - HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
    I knocked myself over once by lifting a solid double-corrugated cardboard box that I thought had a mini-lathe in it- I got ready to lift with both legs and promptly threw the box into my face and fell over. That was one of the weirdest experiences I think I've had.
    - brokenmachine 6y ago
      Also when you think there's a step, and there isn't one.
ben_w 6y ago
Absolutely. A few times a year I might wake up in the middle of the night and — at first glance — perceive a goblin sitting on a nearby chair. As more of me wakes up, I realise it’s a pile of my clothes. Now I’m learning German, I have the experience of listening to a conversation in German, thinking I’ve heard a particular word, asking the locals what it means, and finding neither of them noticed that word being used — but I genuinely hear the unspoken word, so I know a pre-conscious part of my mind is filtering all the German I hear through a vocabulary which is too small. My mother has Alzheimer’s, and one of the bigger surprises was realising quite how many reality-models we have by way of her losing them at different times. When I was caring for her, star jumps terrified her, she forgot what windows look like at night and how to count past 5, and she lost both object permanence and the concept of left: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/alzheimers/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/alzheimers/ One of the advantages of having a model of the world is it allows you to predict the future. The only disadvantage I can think of is that it is comparable to branch prediction failure in a pipelined CPU — for example it can be very tempting to apply that to fellow minds, and when those minds don’t think like you, you can annoy them no end by telling them (implicitly or explicitly) that you know better than they do what they do and don’t want. Or you might become convinced that wearing lucky pants causes your sports team to win/your lottery numbers to come up. Or etc.
simias 6y ago
The other answers to your comment are great but I also want to point out that you can feel your brain doing that if you play some videogames for a long time. You can feel that you develop an intuition for the way the game will behave even if the in-game physics are very different from our real word, showing the plasticity of our brain. If we had a fully hardcoded physics simulator in our head we couldn't "think with portals".
- Bjartr 6y ago
  This reminds me of a story when VR was just becoming big. Someone had been playing the game "Job Simulator" in the restaurant level where you play as a cook in the kitchen of a restaurant. The player was constantly looking in the fridge for things and realized they didn't have to open the door since the game didn't stop their head from clipping through. So they would just stick their head through the door when they needed to check. Cut to a few hours later when they took a break and wanted a snack. So they went to their kitchen and tried to look in their real world fridge, and immediately slammed their head into the door as they tried to stick their head through it without thinking...
  - ars 6y ago
    If I play a racing game for a while, I find it pretty difficult to drive safely right afterward. I have not actually had any incidents, but I have to consciously not crash into things, or drive wildly.
    - brokenmachine 6y ago
      I've had the same experience after playing FPS games for extended periods of time. Everything feels off.
- baq 6y ago
  I felt exactly this when playing Portal for the first time when it came out. It felt like nothing before or after. Highly recommended.
bemmu 6y ago
Here's a quick fun demonstration of this. Close your left eye, then stare at some spot. If you move a finger around the right side of that spot (arm half extended, maybe ~20-30 degrees to the right). If you manage to not move your eye while paying attention to the finger, you'll find that it doesn't look quite right when you put it over the blind spot. With your finger you know it should be there, so something finger-like fills the blind spot. If instead of a finger you try with something like a black dot, you'll see it disappear completely.
longtom 6y ago
This is a compression artifact. You cannot process everything that is going on, so your brain fills in the missing or uncertain parts with a similar (abstract) computation that it already has experienced in a similar manner. It is abstract in the sense that it only replicates some aspects of the real thing. Perceiving such a compression/abstraction is better for increasing reproductive success than receiving just noise when data is missing or has low resolution.
quickthrower2 6y ago
It means the original programmers of PAC-MAN didn't "understand" the game either :-). There was never an "engine"
collyw 6y ago
Yes. Many optical illusions will prove that. Or try some Psychedelics. I assume its beneficial for survival.

Thought experiment: Is my brain also generating reality without a physics engine and is filling in details that it thinks should be there? If true, what are the advantages/disadvantages of it?

coldpie 6y ago

Yes, absolutely. You can catch a baseball because your brain predicts where it will go before your eyes see its actual movement. This may be a good place to start learning more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism

lonelappde 6y ago
How is that "not a physics engine"?
- jcims 6y ago
  It's more general than a physics engine in that it's predicting an expected outcome...it just so happens that the outcome here is largely dictated by physics. (At some level they all are but some more obviously than others)
- contravariant 6y ago
  It's ridiculously bad at modelling quickly rotating objects.
the_af 6y ago
Another fun example of how your brain predicts physics stuff is when you misjudge what something weighs. For example, if you subconsciously judge a glass is full of water but it's actually empty, as you try to lift it your arm will fly up awkwardly. This all happens without conscious thought. Don't tell me it never happened to you!
- HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
  I knocked myself over once by lifting a solid double-corrugated cardboard box that I thought had a mini-lathe in it- I got ready to lift with both legs and promptly threw the box into my face and fell over. That was one of the weirdest experiences I think I've had.
  - brokenmachine 6y ago
    Also when you think there's a step, and there isn't one.

ben_w 6y ago

Absolutely. A few times a year I might wake up in the middle of the night and — at first glance — perceive a goblin sitting on a nearby chair. As more of me wakes up, I realise it’s a pile of my clothes. Now I’m learning German, I have the experience of listening to a conversation in German, thinking I’ve heard a particular word, asking the locals what it means, and finding neither of them noticed that word being used — but I genuinely hear the unspoken word, so I know a pre-conscious part of my mind is filtering all the German I hear through a vocabulary which is too small. My mother has Alzheimer’s, and one of the bigger surprises was realising quite how many reality-models we have by way of her losing them at different times. When I was caring for her, star jumps terrified her, she forgot what windows look like at night and how to count past 5, and she lost both object permanence and the concept of left: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/alzheimers/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/alzheimers/ One of the advantages of having a model of the world is it allows you to predict the future. The only disadvantage I can think of is that it is comparable to branch prediction failure in a pipelined CPU — for example it can be very tempting to apply that to fellow minds, and when those minds don’t think like you, you can annoy them no end by telling them (implicitly or explicitly) that you know better than they do what they do and don’t want. Or you might become convinced that wearing lucky pants causes your sports team to win/your lottery numbers to come up. Or etc.

simias 6y ago

The other answers to your comment are great but I also want to point out that you can feel your brain doing that if you play some videogames for a long time. You can feel that you develop an intuition for the way the game will behave even if the in-game physics are very different from our real word, showing the plasticity of our brain. If we had a fully hardcoded physics simulator in our head we couldn't "think with portals".

Bjartr 6y ago
This reminds me of a story when VR was just becoming big. Someone had been playing the game "Job Simulator" in the restaurant level where you play as a cook in the kitchen of a restaurant. The player was constantly looking in the fridge for things and realized they didn't have to open the door since the game didn't stop their head from clipping through. So they would just stick their head through the door when they needed to check. Cut to a few hours later when they took a break and wanted a snack. So they went to their kitchen and tried to look in their real world fridge, and immediately slammed their head into the door as they tried to stick their head through it without thinking...
- ars 6y ago
  If I play a racing game for a while, I find it pretty difficult to drive safely right afterward. I have not actually had any incidents, but I have to consciously not crash into things, or drive wildly.
  - brokenmachine 6y ago
    I've had the same experience after playing FPS games for extended periods of time. Everything feels off.
baq 6y ago
I felt exactly this when playing Portal for the first time when it came out. It felt like nothing before or after. Highly recommended.

bemmu 6y ago

Here's a quick fun demonstration of this. Close your left eye, then stare at some spot. If you move a finger around the right side of that spot (arm half extended, maybe ~20-30 degrees to the right). If you manage to not move your eye while paying attention to the finger, you'll find that it doesn't look quite right when you put it over the blind spot. With your finger you know it should be there, so something finger-like fills the blind spot. If instead of a finger you try with something like a black dot, you'll see it disappear completely.

longtom 6y ago

This is a compression artifact. You cannot process everything that is going on, so your brain fills in the missing or uncertain parts with a similar (abstract) computation that it already has experienced in a similar manner. It is abstract in the sense that it only replicates some aspects of the real thing. Perceiving such a compression/abstraction is better for increasing reproductive success than receiving just noise when data is missing or has low resolution.

quickthrower2 6y ago

It means the original programmers of PAC-MAN didn't "understand" the game either :-). There was never an "engine"

collyw 6y ago

Yes. Many optical illusions will prove that. Or try some Psychedelics. I assume its beneficial for survival.