11 Comments
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Michael Woudenberg's avatar

It's interesting how our brains convert into different realities based on biases.

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Frank Mariani's avatar

More widespread belief in that fact would lead to greater tolerance (and hopefully understanding and acceptance) of those who differ from us.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Yes to both of these things. I'm here for it!

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Daniel Nest's avatar

"Your brain then decides which bits to pay attention to, and what parts to edit out."

In the meantime, my brain:

https://media.tenor.com/Jfvooie8DbAAAAAi/monkey-cymbals.gif

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Cymbal Monkey lives in that black box all the time.

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

I wrote a story last week about how the similarities between computers and our brains are intentionally getting more pronounced - https://newsletter.wirepine.com/p/cats-made-ai

The core of it is how we got computers to go from programming to learning via neural nets that are modeled on how we think and how we learn. It explained a bunch of things I’d been wondering about. But, the original story I sat down to write was more like yours. It was the inverse - how our brains are a lot like computers. I got the idea from the Neal Stephenson - he talks about how our brains are effectively hardware and useless without software or our experiences to program them. I’d never thought about it like that.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Stephenson has a great way of putting certain things. I was introduced to him in a college literature class (really!) in 1996. It was "The Diamond Age." It was profoundly good, and then I read "Snow Crash." My world changed.

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

I haven't loved a book like I loved Snow Crash in a really long time

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Andrew Smith's avatar

It's like a top five blow-my-face-off experience.

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