Chis Frith
Making Up The Mind
How the Brain Creates our Mental World
Blackwell 2008

My brain creates the „me“ that is released into the social world. Moreover, it is my brain that enables me to share my mental life with my friends and thereby allows us to create something bigger than any of us are capable of on our own.

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A science that explains how the brain creates the mind. In this book I shall show that the distinction between the mental and physical is false. It is an illusion created by the brain. Everything we know, whether it is about the physical or mental world, comes to us through our brain. But our brains connection with the physical world of objects is no more direct than our brains connection with the mental world of ideas. By hiding from us all the unconscious inferences that it makes, our brain creates the illusion that we have direct contact with objects in the physical world. And at the same time our brain creates the illusion that our own mental world is isolated in private.

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... we have no direct connection to the physical world around us, our brains have to make inferences about that world on the basis of the crude sensations they receive from our eyes, ears, and all the other sense organs. These inferences can be wrong. Furthermore there are all sorts of things our brains know that never reach our conscious minds.

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The brains map of the world: Through associative learning the brain constructs a map of the world. This is essentially a map of value. The map locates the objects of high-value where I am likely to be rewarded and the objects of low value where I am not likely to be rewarded.

Boe: Korzybski: The map is not the territory
René Magritte: Ceci n'est pas une pipe



FrithMind111: Chapter 5
Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality.
The remarkable thing about our perception of the physical world in all its beauty and detail is that it seems so easy. In our experience, our perception is not a problem. But this very experience that our perception of the physical world is easy and immediate is an illusion created by our brains.

Shanon - Information Theory: ...what telephone lines transmit is not energy, but messages, whether in the form of speech or as the dots and dashes that compose Morse code - The problem with the scheme provided by information theory is that it takes no account of the viewer. In this scheme (Boe: information-theory) all viewers are the same and then experience of the stimulus will be the same. But we know that all viewers are different. They have different past experiences and different expectations. And these differences affect how we perceive things, our prior knowledge influences our perception.

Boe: the viewer - beobachten - to observe - (Glossar Luhmann)

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For the brain, perception and action are intimately linked the use our bodies to learn about the world. We do things to the world with our bodies and see what happens. This is another feature that early computers lacked. They just looked at the world. They did not do things. They had no bodies. They did not make predictions.
This is another reason why perception and was so difficult for them. My brain discovers what is out there in the world by constructing models of that world. These models are not arbitrary. They are adjusted to give the best possible predictions of my sensations as I act upon the world. But I'm not aware of this complex mechanism.

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How brains model other minds: It is our brain that enables us to enter the world of other minds....our knowledge of the physical world is essentially subjective. What I know about the physical world is captured in a model of that world created by my brain. This model is created from my prior knowledge and the cues provided by my senses.My knowledge of the mental world, a world of other minds, can be created in exactly the same way. From the cues provided by my senses my brain creates a model of a mental world of beliefs, desires, and intentions. Mirror neurons: Our brains have an automatic tendency to imitate any movement that we see. I think that I have direct contact with the physical world, but this is an illusion created by my brain. My brain creates models of the physical world by combining signals from my senses and prior expectations, and it is these models that I'm aware of. I acquire my knowledge of the mental world - the minds of others - in the same way. However it may seem to me, my contact with the mental world is neither more or less direct than my contact with the physical world. Using cues acquired from my senses and prior knowledge acquired from my experience, my brain creates models of the minds of others.

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When two people interact face-to-face, their exchange of meaning is a cooperative venture. Sharing Minds – How the Brain creates Culture - We spend most of our time living in a mental world created by our brains - even when we are assaulted by the real world around us. For most of the time I'm oblivious to the physical world around me. (But) I am not daydreaming in a private world of my own. I am reading books and newspapers. I have entered someone else's mental world. Without doubt our brains most remarkable achievement is to permit communication between minds. The purpose of writing this book is to transfer ideas from my mind into yours. Sending ideas from one mind to another seems vital, almost a compulsion, for us.
...Communication, when we confront each other face-to-face, is not a one-way process from me to you. The way you respond to me alters the way I respond to you. This is a communication loop.When two people interact face-to-face, their exchange of meaning is a cooperative venture.
...By building models of the mental world, our brains have solved the problem of how to get inside the minds of others. And it is this ability to make models of the mental world that has created the great gap between humans and all other species.
Without the ability to build and share mental models of the world, there would be no such things as language and culture.

Me and my brain: We are embedded in the mental world of others just as we are in bedded in the physical world. What we are currently doing and thinking is moulded by whomever we are interacting with. But this is not how we experience ourselves. We experience ourselves as agents with minds of our own. This is the final illusion created by our brains.
...If we look at the person and the brain in isolation, then the frontal cortex is the ultimate source of control. But people and their brains are rarely found in isolation. Isolation is bad for them. The human brain is essentially tuned for interactions with other people. Concepts like will, responsibility, and even meaning arise from these interactions.
...There is an intimate relationship between our experience that we are free agents and our willingness to be altruistic, feeling pleased when we are behaving fairly ourselves and feeling upset by the unfairness of others. For these feelings to arise it is crucial that we experience ourselves and others as free agents. We believe that all of us make deliberate choices. Otherwise I willingness to cooperate would fall apart. This final illusion created by our brain - that we are detached from the social world and free agents - enables us to create together a society and culture that is so much more than any individual.

Chris Frith Making up the Mind