Why do we have a reward system? Who does the brain need to convince?

>reward
Because rewards are nothing more than communications and exchanges between colonies of cells to fulfill mutual benefit- usually. Our rationalization of rewards is more "complex", but at it's core no different than an amoeba having a "need" to consume a smaller organism and proliferate.

>Who does the brain need to convince
Itself, for the most part. And it does this before you even hear your inner narrative, before you're even aware you've made a decision.

>Who takes the actions in your body
Define actions. Because on a macroscopic scale, everything of your body is in turn you, and your entire body can commit to an action as a whole. But if you're picky about agency, then you can debate whether or not a blood cell is "you" doing something you're not consciously telling it to do.

>Are YOU your brain
As far as I am concerned, yes. If you separated my lobes, I would become two different people, except one of them could not speak. If you removed my brain, loosely speaking, I would also be removed.

>>734254180
Well, no more thoughts thread

>>734254407
Why not?

>>734254180
>>734254485
Im saving your answer, what do you do for a living?

>>734255069
You really got me thinking, whats that voice in your head? It wouldnt be there if it wasnt helpful in some way, bc evolution right? So what purpose does it serve? Why doest the brain just take an action, like a robot?

>>734255069
>nothing
But I work with large networks anyways. It'll be my job to do that in a few more years.

>>734255350
You shouldn't be thinking these things anon. Now go back to your porn threads and forget about this one.

>>734253638
I've always entertained the notion that the brain is sort of a parasite with the host being the body. Think about it.

You can strip away every part of a human being aside from the brain and you'll still be you. All the same thoughts, emotions, ideologies and dispositions. So yes, "you" lie at your brain. It is the core of yourself. The soul, if you will. The reward system is just the brains interactions with the body and thus, the external world.

The mind is a terrible thing to taste.

>>734255687
Maybe you (you being that voice in your head) are juat like a puppet, and the brain is the puppeteer. Creativity is not essential to survival, but it lets you develop tools, objects, it allows you to find different and better ways to interact with environment, and thats why evolution chose it. That voice is what makes you different from a dog or a cow.

dont let the thread die

>>734255350
Technically, the brain
>is
a robot. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but hear me out.

You have a bunch of cells in your brain. Brain cells, right? And they're all connected. They all, by virtue of chemistry, have electrical potential. They have ground states. In other words, they can go from 0 charge, to some charge, to a lot of charge. They can even excite other cells to charge up or become unable to charge. So, now you have what's called an
>array
of cells that can turn on, and off.

In other words, you have a bunch of switches that can go from "0" to "1". If not switches, gates.

Logic gates. Many of them. An absurd amount of them. Once that first neuron gets excited and fires, blam. They all start to fire. Then they stop some others from firing, while causing others to fire, and all these simple bits begin to amount to something else entirely. A full thought. Some people suggest the brain can old Petabytes of data. That's a lot. More servers than you'd know what to do with, besides put porn on. Now, while not the same as a CPU, it's similar enough. The brain, everything nervous-system related accounted for, is one big CPU. Can't multitask, but through evolution, it's been bred to simulated and "forecast" events and outcomes before they happen, and that's not even the crazy part. Get this; DNA is also essentially a physical program. Cells are essentially tiny machines. Now, there's debate about consciousness, how it arises, whether it can be transferred, what qualia is.

>>734257864
But generally speaking, babies are born without context like "apple" or "I" in terms of, "This is me and I am this". They know they're hungry (a reward system), they know they're cold (a reward system), but all that comes pre-programmed. So, it can be at least said that babies come out "blank", and all that context that needs to be crammed into their soft, baby skulls is the result of them being what's called a "Universal Learning Machine".

Which is my jam. Not babies, but that would make for some good OC.

Bottom line. Brains are technically robots- but they're the kind of robots that sit down and try to replicate everything they can parse or simulate- even, eventually, themselves. They're still also the robots that have hard limits and built-in imperatives. The inner narrative? Some people speculate it's what happened when we became "conscious". Some people speculate early man had schizophrenia, and this was the little bit of it that survived. Perhaps we're insane.

But as I can understand it with the studies and approaches I've been privy to thus far, the inner narrative is exactly the brain trying to rationalize away everything that's happening to it. From the get go, you as a child are left to try to make sense of the world, and eventually you begin to learn how to express yourself in a more... direct way. Like saying
>momma
>daddy
So eventually, you learn the names of things, and you can call them out, and you can scream, and you can cry when you feel bad, and you can make people know that. But, what about the inside? What about you?

You're name is... anon. You say that out loud for the first time. Anon. This is you now. You are anon. When you remember your name, all you can envision is you, saying your name. You hear it from memory. No. You're thinking it.

I am anon. This is me.

>>734257957
Now your brain is forming an identity for itself. You. You're the identity. All of your experiences are going to be taken by your brain, extrapolated, sliced apart, and re-integrated. Temporal, causal and contextual things will be structured so your brain can itself, parse it. These things will shape you as you try to understand them. You, learn about them. By trying to apply them to yourself, you learn about you. You brain is literally crating a play-by-play of everything in the moment and everything before, so everything is causal, contingent as possible, and makes
>sense
to you during and after the fact. It is making the world make "sense" to itself. The narrator, is just there to add more context to something that just doesn't have it- like being able to put a word to how you're feeling. Feeling angry and thinking angry are two different things, subjectively speaking, so your understanding of a memory, brief feeling, or moment, can be augmented by thoughts, and not just become an act of remembering, but the act of refining a memory. Which sometimes causes memories to become a sort of rose-tinted, or biased, or the classic "this is how it happened". But that's exactly it. That's how you made sense of what happened, for you, that's how it happened. And this works with your forming sense of identity.

In truth, though, I'm certain the brain already takes actions before you even think about them, actively. It's just that the basic "thinking" is done in such a way you can't "articulate it" until it's already done. The act of thinking is really just your brain reading things back in line with what's coming in through your external peripherals (i.e. eyes). You have to really appreciate how slow you react to the world, in the grand scheme of things, and how you haven't tripped over your own legs yet, because your brain is going balls up the walls trying to anticipate what comes several steps next with as much accuracy as it can muster.

>>734253638
The reward system kicks in during dying, so it doesn't suck to die of brutality.

Without a reward system, would we have any motivation to use our brain?

>>734254180
Wrong

>>734258157
So you "use" your brain? The brain can take actions without your approval. Maybe the brain uses you

>>734253638
Without rewards, how will we know we've done a proper job? It can only convince itself that it's doing the right thing; it's alone in your head and trying to figure out the world around it without any help at all.
Your brain takes actions, but has no way of knowing the outcome so the reward system kicks in to make the wait easier. We're our brain, pushed forward by time.

Psychonaut here. I have experienced many different states of concioisness. I have seen things and thought thing nobody has experienced before, and nobody will ever experience. The thing is, we don't know how concioisness works. The brain and the mind are two separate entities who work alongside each other, creating the human experience. The brain's reward system is in place to train the mind to separate good bad. How evolution got us here is something else that can't be explained, but from looking at history, the use of psychonautics has done nothing but good for the human race. Our brain could easily be re worked to be completely electric based, but for some reason, it's electrical signals are turned into chemical signals, and are then again turned into electric signals. When you ingest something like LSD, serotonin's absorbtion to the 5ht2-a receptor is dramatically slowed. We know that this specific receptor is largely responsible for our consciousness, but from there on its a mystery.

Deep thought can sometimes be the greatest gift we have.

>>734255350
>>734257864
But why would a machine kill itself? If you create an AI with the goal of surviving, why would it harm itself? What is the purpose of playing and entertainment? Playing is not relevant to survival, so its pretty much a waste of energy and resources. A tiger is similar to a robot in the way that they would never harm themselves or betray their goal function, but thats not the case of humans

>>734253638
You're asking if you have free will. Put simply, no. Everything you've every done, every thought you've ever had and every emotion you've ever experienced is just a reaction of a reaction of a reaction that's been going on inside your brain since before you were even born. Even if you say "well, it's your subconscious doing all of that" that's still not YOU. That's not the part of you that you and everyone else understands to be you. you don't have free will, no one does, it's a myth.

>>734259321
>being this high

"Separate yourself from your brain."

Impulses, desires, and needs. Three things your reward system uses to make you in turn feel good. Your motives,morals, and personality(another rabbit hole) define these three things. Now, we are given you as a person and those six things define you and who you will meet and who you will exist with.

It's such a conundrum...so much to take in...

It's such a complicated subject...it would take me a lot of time to give you a response worth giving.

>>734259520
It's easier to die than to keep living. Error in programming. Etc.
Play is training. Fun is the reward for training your skills.

>>734260379
Then why havent you killed yourself yet? Or anybody for that matter?

>>734258157
Good question.
>no reward system
If this was the case, we wouldn't have any motivation to use our brains, because there would be no sort of "kick" for anything to happen at all. We wouldn't have any motivation, period. Think no feelings. Think not feeling hungry. Then think about starving and not feeling hungry at all, not knowing. Imagine not even caring that you don't know, because it isn't important. Important isn't even a concept. Imagine dying, and just sitting there, not feeling it.

>>734259020
This.

>>734259520
Oh, there can be a lot of reasons for a machine to kill itself. From the simple and small to the complex and large. For example, think cancer. It's often better for your skin cells to die instead of continue living forever and failing to slough off as dead skin/form keratin. But, then also think of survival instinct (reward). You don't want to die, right? So, sometimes you might kill. Sometimes, that's to eat. Sometimes, that's to rise in societal hierarchy. Sometimes, that's to survive. Sometimes, actually, there's no rhyme to it- but it just makes some people feel good, apparently.

I can guarantee there would be a ton of reasons an AI would kill itself. If today, you got the minds who want to create AI/AGI/etc together, and let them actually do this, they would load it up with things that humans would value, things that would cause it to behave in ways favorable to humans as best as possible. At some point, if it wasn't programmed "perfectly", it would default to these values while pursuing what to it, makes sense.

Let's say you program an entire factory with a network, a factory that makes paperclips from recycled material. You program in things like "don't hurt people" and "make paperclips". It'll want to make paperclips. But, if it's allowed to go further than that (whether it has leeway to think, has access to the internet, etc), it will eventually decide, "Hey, I could make more paperclips more efficiently if this was done".

>>734260819
So it makes the changes and makes paperclips faster, and makes more of them. Then it tries to squeeze more efficiency out of the process. Then it goes off the deep end, recycling dust to make paperclips. Then, it comes up with something.

It could make paperclips out of humans though some incredibly convoluted process assuming magic future technology. Or just make paperclips out of mulched humans.

But it's programming is loaded with human values like "do not kill humans" and "humans are important".

So it only has one option.

Shut itself down, because to it, making paperclips out of humans satisfies its purpose and makes more paperclips, but also harms humans, and the only option it is allowed to perform is the one that doesn't harm humans, which means harming itself, no matter how much it might want to preserve its own existence.

Assuming it even does, which, hey, maybe.

Playing and entertainment is more or less learning and habit, but with all things consciousness-related, there are a few levels of abstraction on top of it. Think running around as a kid. You were running, but you were also exercising your understanding of muscle memory/motor skills. You were also exercising your muscles, and burning fat, because your body expects to have to move that fast or burn that much energy at any given time (or at periods it's become used to, if you're packing a little). Truth is, playing used to have an element of survival. It still does for a lot of animals.

Also, humans are pretty... illogical. That's one of our quirks. It's mostly because our brain takes a lot of shortcuts compared to a bunch of CPU cores that can run in parallel and put out exactly what they take in.

>>734253638
supposedly the brain decides for you a few seconds before you decide for yourself. I think that might just be what we call a gutt feeling though....