Your mind — the game engine
Few movies have the capacity to shock me to the core and alter my perception of the world — the Matrix is one of them. I recall leaving the cinema with a weird feeling of what if… Now, more than twenty years later, I have the same feeling after listening to Joscha Bach on the Lex Fridman podcast. The same chill. But this time it is not a movie!
In short, Joscha (and others) propose that our mind is basically a game engine with a good physics module. This module enables you to predict future states of the environment with sufficient accuracy to prevent you from harming the hardware (your body) hosting the game engine. Essentially, we are all participating in a multiplayer roleplaying game on the server called “The Universe”, which was booted approximately 13.8 billion years ago. Your player is currently granted a maximum of 12 decades on the server.
Predicting future states
As mentioned above, the key feature of the game engine is to predict the future state of the environment. Water flow downhill, a dog bark means there is a dog nearby, and you will get dirty fingers if you squeeze the rotten banana.
Your body is spending an enormous amount of energy on the brain and one way to save energy is to run the prediction engine with the least amount of “surprises”. This is why you place your keys in the same…
