[estevaoam]

Lately I arrived to the hypothesis that our minds are nothing else than an illusion. Of course, a very useful one.

Why? Because I can draw an analogy to a video game character with some shocking sucess.

DISCLAIMER: I just like to overthink this for fun, I am no scientist and I am not affirming facts, just throwing some idea around at the end of my workday. :)

If you play games, think on a first-person shooter (FPS). When you embody a character on those games, it has a certain "amount of life" that can be drained or filled. If you take too much damage you die.

In case another character is shooting at me, most modern games will give you several hints that you should pay attention to take action and save yourself: the character's vision can start to fade, the sounds starts getting muffled and you will get visual hints from where you might have been getting your shots from. If you hide yourself, after some time you will start to recover your "life bar". You normally get a positive visual hint that tells you that.

Same for NPCs: if you shoot at them, their "life bar" will decrease and, if the game as a good ~AI~, the NPC will try to save themselves: hide, flank you, whatever.

Now think about our human brain and how we learned in recent years how our dopamine neurotransmitter works: it is a neurotransmitter that modulates both our "pleasure" and "pain" sensations, among many other things. If we do things that are very bad for us, we feel "pain" and we learn we shouldn't do more of those. Opposite is also true: if we do things that are nice for us, it makes us learn to do more of that.

Why those negative or positive hints we see in our screens when playing such shooter games wouldn't be conceptually the same as what we experience as human beings? When I play such games I can see superb image quality and simulated human behavior, and all that is running in a hardware just in front of my eyes with some shiny RGBs.

Why the pain I feel "in reality" would be any different than the "pain" experienced by those virtual characters? Both have the purpose to push the organism, virtual or real, to perform certain actions.

Perhaps we will discover soon that our minds are nothing but a well-constructed illusion that is being created by our brains when we're awaken. Which is nothing short of just amazing, by the way.

[BobbyJo]

The flaws I see in this logic are:

1) It ignores the existence of critical thresholds. I can keep cooling water by 1 degree and it will keep being water until suddenly it is not. We have no reason to believe consciousness does or doesn't work the same way.

2) Pain and pleasure are both motivators for an agent to react to. There is nothing to differentiate the two in n NPCs code. Is it pain they are running away from, or pleasure they are running toward? It doesn't make sense to speculate because really it's just some number causing some predetermined animation to run. A grain of sand is more computationally complex than a video game NPC.

Subjective experience is a great platform for evolution to build survival tools on: pleasure, pain, fear, etc. Any of these is possible:

1) Evolution stumbled upon subjectivity as an architectural abnormality, and built tools on top of it.

2) Evolution stumbled on subjectivity as a critical threshold of processing power, and built tools on top of it.

3) Evolution built tools and subjectivity is a byproduct.