How Human Intelligence Works

[beavis]

This may appear to be off topic, but its not, because how Human intelligence works is relevant to psychic abilities and how they connect to quantum physics. Search for "quantum" in the text below to find the most relevant part. Understanding how your mind works helps you do psychic things better because you can learn what your mind is doing when it works and learn to do it better. I wrote this when thinking about artificial intelligence compared to Human minds, but its useful knowledge for many things.

What you think your eyes see is mostly a memory. People think they're seeing what's in front of their eyes, but the way we think while awake is more like a dream than what's in front of our eyes. I often look straight at something and don't see it because I don't remember it. Next time you see something unlike anything you've seen before, close your eyes and think about drawing a picture of it. If you saw 2 birds behind it, are you sure you didn't see 3 birds? Was the first bird flapping its wings up or down just before you closed your eyes? My picture would be very blurry. If you were standing beside me, you wouldn't be able to tell my picture was of the same thing you're looking at. I used to have a visual memory, able to draw such a picture very accurately, but I decided there were more advantages to not thinking in such a strict logical way and slowly lost the ability. Theres 2 main reasons Monkeys have a visual memory and most Humans don't. Its a form of lossy-compression (Example: jpg, mp3, keeps the details you tend to notice) which saves memory, and it allows our thoughts to flow together in more flexible ways so we can imagine more possibilities.

Scientists try to learn how Human brains work the hard way. They build expensive simulations, do experiments on animal brains, scan peoples' brains for electricity and blood flow patterns (functional MRI) while those people think certain things, write lots of papers, and still they are unable to write a few pages explaining to average people how Human intelligence works. I do some of that research, but I'm an expert on Human intelligence for a different reason: My mind has observed itself long enough to figure out half of how itself works. Many people have tried that, but they usually get stuck on the subjectivity and vagueness of their thoughts. Intuitively they know what a thought is, but they know of no way to figure out which neurons (brain cells) are connected to which thoughts, so they can not translate their knowledge of how their mind works into something science can use.

Here's something unnecessary researchers want to try: A computer's video-card has a grid of brightness numbers, 1 for each colored light on the screen. If we could connect the visual part of a Human brain to a computer screen and see what its thinking (1 small group of neurons to each part of the screen), while we show the person various pictures and ideas, then we could learn how the visual-related neurons work, and then learn how the neurons connected to those work, and so on. We don't need to do that because each of us already has such a video screen in our minds. Its called "what we think our eyes see".

Its not really what our eyes see. Its our most similar memories, twisted and rotated and re-interpreted to fill in the missing parts. Our brains throw away most of what our eyes see and fill in most of the parts from memory. While dreaming, almost the same thing happens. Our brains use nothing from our eyes and fill it all in from re-interpretations of our memory. We're mostly dreaming while awake, with the exception of a little information our brains pay attention to coming from our eyes and other senses.

I will explain how to start with your vision, do some thought-experiments, and work backward to the other parts of your brain until you understand more about Human intelligence than scientists understand from their billions of dollars of research. I know enough about how Human intelligence works that I could build half of it and have artificial intelligence evolve the other parts, but it takes many years to fine-tune it and teach it like you teach a Human baby, like you would teach it math by giving it simulations of fingers and activating the neurons for 3 of its fingers to teach it the idea of 3, and you would teach it to multiply 2 times 5 by showing it its 2 simulated hands and they have 5 fingers each, or whatever type of simulated or robot body and senses you give it. This would be a robot or simulation so accurate it would learn ethics from the recursive thought of thinking of others as a variation of itself (a directed network where each node type is the idea of itself and one of the nodes is attached to a person) and thinking about the emotions (recursive thoughts leading to memories of pleasure or pain) itself had when things happened to itself. All that, I can define in math, but instead I'll take you through my series of thought-experiments of how I figured it out...

You can learn most of it from your visual memory. You only need to understand these few things about neurons:
* Each part of "what we think our eyes see" is always connected to the same small group of neurons and is brighter when there is more electricity in those neurons.
* Each neuron is connected to thousands of other neurons, and they connect and disconnect slowly over time.
* A thought is the specific amount of electricity in some of your neurons, what each neuron tends to do when it receives certain amounts of electricity, and the strength and physical length of the neuron-to-neuron connections. A much smaller amount, a thought is the chemicals flowing around neurons.

This started when I was thinking about what some research said, that it takes longer to recognize a picture of something if its upside down. What was really interesting about that is if it was turned 2 times more angle, then it takes 2 times longer to recognize it. Upside down is the biggest angle. The time it takes to recognize a picture of anything is linearly proportional to the angle its turned.

I chose something I had rarely seen, so I could experience more of the process of thinking about a new subject. I thought about an elephant. When it was drawn on "what we think our eyes see", which is also the imagination and visual neurons for dreams, I confirmed that it did take longer to draw it in my mind upside down than the same way as in my memories of elephants. After I thought about the elephant from each new angle, I found I was able to think of that angle again instantly, but any new angle took the linear rotation time. It could be a rotation from any of my old memories or new thoughts from the last minute. As I thought of the elephant from more angles, the time to think of the angles between them became less. I confirmed what I had read. Human intelligence does rotation a little at a time and repeats until it gets to the right angle. Also, I learned that such rotations create new memories which can be used as the start for new rotations, so to do it faster, you usually start from the closest memory of a rotation to the one you want, a 3d memory of an elephant's parts rotated closest to the rotation you're thinking about now.

Remember this is causing an image of an elephant to be drawn in electricity on your visual neurons. They're not arranged in a rectangle in your brain like on a screen. They're arranged however they're connected to your optical nerves. But if you figure out which neurons are connected to which part of "what we think our eyes see", which can be done using brain scanning machines, then you would see a picture of an elephant rotating in the electricity of those neurons. There is actually a picture of an elephant, made of electricity, somewhere in your brain, if you arrange the neurons the right way like you would see on a screen. Brainwaves are so advanced they can form into the shape of an elephant, or anything else you imagine. Its important to understand that's what we're looking at when we think about rotating an elephant in our minds. We're drawing an elephant onto our visual neurons, very similar to how a computer's video-card's memory works.

The next thought-experiment shows a flaw in how we see 2 things at once. I chose 2 things I had never seen together, to experiment with how my brain combines ideas. I thought about the same elephant with a shoe floating 3 feet above it. The shoe was drawn onto my visual neurons quickly. But when I thought about rotating them together, viewing the shoe and elephant from a different location and angle, I could only see 1 thing at a time, the shoe or the elephant. Whichever I looked at, the other instantly started looking blurry. Is my imagination really that weak that it can't handle 2 things at once without blurring 1 of them? It only happened when rotating them together.

I'm guessing that is because the 3d-rotation part of my brain normally only does 1 object at a time and rotates the shoe or the elephant and draws them on my visual neurons separately. I confirmed that when I noticed I could rotate them together as easily as if they were a single object only after thinking about them together for 30 seconds. It was a new type of thing in my mind, a shoe-over-elephant, and it was rotated with the same linear timing as the shoe or elephant alone. At first they had to be processed separately, so the visual neurons lost their image of one while the other was being drawn, but when shoe-over-elephant became a single object in my mind, it did not have those problems.

That is the start of my theory on how objects are represented in 3d in Human minds. They are made of other 3d objects in relative positions and rotations and sizes and stretch amounts etc. Later I'll explain how such "objects within objects" are the same type of thinking as language, goals, emotions, and other types of thinking. It sounds complex, but its really the same simple ideas repeated in different ways for many kinds of thinking.

The next thought-experiment is about counting and how we identify if 2 things we see are the same object or idea. Think about 3 of that same elephant, all standing the same direction. Its easy. Now think about 3 elephants with a shoe above each, the shoe-over-elephant object recently created in your mind. Also easy. Rotate all that. Since they're standing the same direction, it happens almost as fast as if there's just 1 shoe-over-elephant, because the same object is rotated and drawn 3 times from slightly different angles. Now think of 100 elephants standing the same direction. Also easy.

Here's the surprising part. If 100 elephants are easy to visualize, then 2 elephants standing opposite directions should also be easy. But its not. I experience the same blurring of 1 of 2 objects (the elephant standing forward or the one standing backward) when I pay attention to the other object, the same as happened between the shoe and elephant before it became shoe-over-elephant. Similarly, after thinking about such 2 elephants long enough, that problem goes away, and they can be rotated, moved, duplicated and rotated again, etc, as one object made of 2 of each part of an elephant. Your mind has to represent 2 of each part of an elephant because it has to know that the tail of one elephant is beside the trunk of the other elephant, for example. If you think of it as 2 elephants, instead of a single object, then you have the linear rotation time (before drawing on your visual neurons) every time you switch your attention to the other elephant.

After it becomes 1 object in your mind, think of that two-elephants-one-reversed object and a duplicate of it rotated and beside it, so you have 4 total elephants each at a different angle. Its easier now, while at first you had problems with 2 elephants at different angles. You can continue making the total be 1 object, rotating and moving a duplicate of it, and doubling the number of elephants each time, until you have as many elephants as you want in your visual neurons, each rotated differently.

You'll notice during your duplication of elephants that some of the parts of some of the elephants disappear until you pay attention to them again. How does your mind know what to replace the missing parts with? First your mind looks at two-elephants-one-reversed to see how each 2 elephants are standing relative to each other. Then recursively you look at the specific elephant in that. Then recursively you look at your definition of elephant for the smaller parts of elephants, and its drawn that way on your visual neurons.

You may also notice that when you pay attention to your definition of elephant, that more than 1 elephant gets those parts updated at once. For example, I had forgotten that elephants had tusks, but when I remembered, they were drawn on all 4 elephants. First your mind updates elephant, then two-elephants-one-reversed, then both examples of two-elephants-one-reversed which you're thinking about simultaneously. Its a hierarchy, but your mind can represent non-hierarchy things too, as I'll explain later with fractals.

The next thought-experiment is about wildcards in ideas, patterns that have places for other patterns to fit in. How does your mind decide which ideas to plug into which other ideas?

We remember the shoe-over-elephant well. Now think of 3 elephants standing the same direction. The one on the right has a shoe over it. Rotate all that until it becomes 1 object. Now we will generalize the shoe-over-elephant object to wildcard-over-elephant. The elephant on the left has an apple over it. The elephant in the middle has an orange over it. Visualize that from various rotations. Now pay attention to the shoe (over the right elephant). The shoe-over-elephant object is a stronger memory than the apple and orange, so the shoe should not change unless you try to change it. What surprised me is what happened next when I payed attention to the 2 other elephants. What is over each of them? It switched quickly between apple and orange a few times per second, over each of those 2 elephants, because I did not have a strong memory of which elephant got which fruit. The shoe did not change, but the apple and orange did. After choosing where I wanted each fruit to be and thinking about it longer, I was able to rotate the whole thing (3 elephants with 3 things over them) without the objects switching places. Why did they switch places? Because 2 things were combined with 2 wildcard-over-elephant, but there was no strong preference between which way to combine them. My visual neurons displayed both possibilities, switching between them a few times per second.

So far, I've explained these types of thinking:
* 2d grid of visual neurons, absolute positions instead of relative. In math its called a matrix, but there's also the layers of edge-detection and connections to the "3d grid" described below.
* 3d grid of object positions and rotations and sizes relative to other 3d objects. In math its called a sparse-matrix. Later I'll explain how rotation, speed, and acceleration are also dimensions attached to each of those 3 dimensions, and some ideas use a 4d grid with time, but there is no rotation between the 3d and time dimensions of the 4d grid.
* Hierarchy of ideas, and I've claimed (but not yet explained) that it is more generally a network (of nodes pointing at nodes) which allows cycles, where some nodes are ideas and some are wildcards. In math, its called a directed-network.

Sound is experienced similar to the 2d visual neuron grid. Human ears detect around 1500 different tones and a volume for each, many times per second. You can easily remember what you heard a few seconds ago and predict what you will hear a few seconds from now, therefore time is one of the dimensions of sound, a dimension represented almost the same way as left/right or up/down is represented in your visual neurons. The other dimension is the 1500 notes. Brightness is like their volume. I say the 1500 notes are a dimension, instead of 1500 unordered things, because you can hear the same music with all notes increased in tone, and you will recognize it as the same music. That's similar to how you recognize the same object visually if its to your left or in the center of your vision.

The main difference between the 2d visual grid and the 2d sound grid is the sound grid is aligned to time but never space, and the visual grid is mostly aligned to space and some to time. The audio grid moves forward with time, but you can also skip ahead (like you can pay attention to whats on the left side of your vision, skipping in space) or slow down what you expect to hear so you're surprised when you hear it sooner, or listen to the same sounds slower or faster and still recognize them. The 2d audio grid has stretching and bending, but it does not normally have rotation.

To understand how the visual grid is connected to time, stand up and spin in a circle until you get dizzy. Then stop and look straight ahead. Whatever you're looking at will continuously move to the side at the same speed you were spinning, but when it gets too far it jumps back. That's because your 2d visual grid has a speed dimension, but its not a full dimension because each part of the 2d grid only has 1 speed and direction (and no acceleration, that's just in the 3d+1d grid). Each thing you're looking at moves in some direction. If it instantly stops, you will see it continue moving for a fraction of a second and then become surprised as memories are accessed to try to match the new thing you're looking at (the stopped object).

The main differences between the 2d visual grid and the 2d audio grid are (1) the audio grid does not normally do rotation, and (2) the audio grid's time dimension is the same as your visual grid's horizontal space dimension when you're dizzy from spinning horizontally. After realizing the similarity, I thought about creating a software which would see through a camera and translate it to audio, with tone as one dimension and time as the other, scanning over the video a few times per second as you hear it, which could be used to see through your ears. I did a search and found it already exists: http://seeingwithsound.com I downloaded it on my Android phone for free. Things lower in the phone's vision have a lower tone. Its hard to use because the moving horizontal line scans the picture too slow, and they could have chosen different sound effects for translating what it sees, but its close to what I was thinking, based on how I recently realized brains work. If you want to understand how the 2d visual grid and the 2d sound grid of your mind are similar and can be connected, search Android apps for "The vOICe for Android" or other systems. The fact that some blind people now see through their ears confirms my 2d audio grid theory and what I wrote here: http://spacecollective.org/BenRayfield/6799/Alternative-To-Brain-Implants

Unlike visual neurons, which are connected to your 3d grid neurons, there is no rotation between the 2 dimensions of your sound grid. Here's what separates Human minds from animal minds. We can learn new types of thinking. We are born with a brain shape that tends toward learning to rotate things visually. 2d grid is a type of thinking. 3d+1d_for_time is a type of thinking. You can think about 4 notes at once, as 4 dots in your vision. Align your 2d visual grid to your 2d sound grid, and imagine a sound the way you imagine it in your vision. Vertically the 4 dots play 4 notes at the same time. Rotate them horizontally and they play the same note 4 times. Rotate them 45 degrees and they play 4 different notes (closer together in tone than if they were completely vertical) at 4 different times (also closer together in time for the same reason). Think about that long enough and you'll learn a rotation ability in your 2d audio grid. You would re-use the 3d+1d grid for rotating between tone and time, the same way you use the 3d+1d grid for rotating your vision. If you do this thought-experiment enough, you would recognize if you heard sound rotated that way.

There is much disagreement on if brains have any quantum or nonlocal abilities, even in small amounts. If you search youtube for "psi wheel in a box 2" you'll see a video of me moving a piece of aluminum foil with my mind, so some of us have direct experience to answer that question. You can read about the debate here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind In the context of how Human intelligence works, I'll explain where that fits in. Telekinesis (moving things with your mind) starts using the 3d+1d grid in a very general way, with a centered mind. In my mind I see a 3d moving field, a smooth surface, without colors, and my thoughts bend it in complex ways. When I change my subconscious thoughts in a way that makes the "3d moving field" become flat and stop moving, then I am in a very centered state of mind and get the more advanced access to reality: Whatever I look at, and form ideas in my mind of (like shoe-over-elephant is an object, described above) whatever I'm looking at, by directing my attention to each part of the object individually and thinking about what it would feel like to touch each part of it... When I have a representation of the target object in my mind, and I continue to adjust my subconscious thoughts to keep the "3d moving field" balanced and motionless, then after that the other parts of telekinesis are done exactly like dreaming. Example: Rotate the object in your mind the same way you normally think about objects from different angles, and if you did it right, the object rotates in reality. It feels like reality is an other part of your mind, like you're dreaming but have only a very weak ability to change the dream, but that does not mean that's what reality really is. It means that's a way you can think to learn how to do telekinesis. Psychic abilities (including telepathy and telekinesis) are done mostly in the 3d+1d grid and a little connected to the 2d audio grid (temporal lobe) parts of my brain. I don't see or hear it, but those are the types of thinking its most similar to. Most people have no rotation ability in their 2d audio grid, but they can learn it. Similarly, most people never learn to use their telepathic or telekinetic abilities, while they do have the brain parts to access it. There is no brain part that only does psychic things. Each part has many functions.

How we understand physics. A basketball moving toward a wall is matched to memories of basketball moving toward a wall, adjusted in the speed dimension of the 3d+1d grid, the time of the sound is predicted, and similar memories are updated depending on if the sound is experienced before or after the expected time of the sound. Whichever idea happens first, the expected sound or the experienced sound, is wired toward the other, which defines the relative timing of memories. If you always expect sounds to happen a little after they really do, your expectation will slowly adjust. Since your experience of the ball hitting the wall happened before your older memory of it, next time you see a ball going toward a wall, and adjust the memory to match its speed (in the space and time stretching dimensions of the 3d+1d grid), your prediction of the time of the sound will be earlier because the earlier event was wired toward the older memory which makes it happen sooner.

The 3d+1d grid is 4 dimensions. Time is a dimension because you can think of the same 3d objects in different 3d positions in the same thought, and you can easily move forward or backward in time to see the 3d objects in different positions, and you can easily see all such 3d positions overlapping in the same thought. The most central part of Human intelligence is the 4d grid of x y z and time. Its used to combine all ideas of dimensions, numbers, fractions, rotation, stretching, bending, cause and effect, representation of your body and movements, and for translating between different kinds of dimensions like the tone dimension and the horizontal visual dimension.

The 3d+1d grid (sometimes I call it the 4d grid, but only for ideas that use time) is a grid of numbers, while a dimension can be just 1 number. There is a grid of positions of objects in space and time, in your mind. Every idea that has position or rotation etc shares neurons with many other such objects, and their association, as a directed-network of neurons, forms the 3d+1d grid. There are more than 3+1 dimensions for some ideas. There are 3 space dimensions, 3 rotation dimensions, and for each of those 6 dimensions, there are position, speed, and acceleration. Similar for time, but no rotation, and just speed, no acceleration. That is 18+2 dimensions. Example: speed of rotation around the x dimension, which modifies ideas in the 3d+1d grid. When you think about a coin spinning, it has negative acceleration as it slows its spinning. You can represent such slowing of spinning easily in your mind. That is an idea which has a negative position in a rotation acceleration dimension of your mind, a cached (a computer word) idea of a specific motion of a coin, so you can think about similar motions of coins faster and easier.

But not all dimensions are grids. The 3 space position and 3 space rotation and 1 time position dimensions are grids, while other dimensions are normally only single positions. The difference between a grid and a single point in a dimension is how many examples of it are in your mind. Grids are created from the networking of many examples together, aligning parts of them together.

For this part, you would need to understand more math and artificial intelligence: Language is a depth-first traversal of the directed-networks of ideas where each node in such networks is an idea or wildcard, and they fit together through the wildcards. If you use the 2 chatbots (1 at word granularity and 1 at letter granularity, same algorithm) in my CodeSimian software (in the Intelligent Chatbots tab, copy/paste text into the top and click the button to give it something to talk about first), then you will see a depth-first traversal of directed-networks of words (or letters, which form into words the same way words form into sentences). Its a very simple algorithm but creates surprisingly Human-like responses if you have a conversation with it. It appears to understand grammar and has a short memory of what you were just talking about, without having anything except a statistical memory of what words lead to what other words and a simple neural network of such directed-network.

Similarly, goals are also a directed-network. When a cycle is found in such network, the goals can not be accomplished until something changes. In such a network, a node points at its subgoals. Goals are an emergent property of networks of memories and many other parts of your mind. Goals are simply the recursion of ideas that lead to more memories of pleasure and less memories of pain.

Game-theory, where people (or robots) think about what others are thinking about others... is simply an other form of directed-network where some of the nodes are yourself and some are other people/robots/etc. Ethics comes from your goals about yourself being translated through such a directed-network so you can think about others having those same goals, and recursively how many people/robots/etc can work together to all accomplish their common goals. The kind of ethics most people have are this simple equation, which I've described in a non-technical way. That is not the only kind of ethics, but its a good approximation of most peoples' ethics, and it can be coded into an artificial intelligence by evolving software toward the ways of thinking I've described.

Here's a thought-experiment to show an other use of the 2d visual grid in representing an abstract idea. How do you represent the idea of clear glass in your mind? It's not a color, but in some ways it is. How do you represent the part where you can see through it? When I asked myself that question, I got a visual of a person on the right, a glass window in the middle, a box on the left, and a straight line from the person's eyes to the box through the glass. When I thought about something thats not clear, the glass in the middle was replaced by it, and the line was cut off so it was only from the middle to the person's eyes. That's how I visually represent the difference between clear and not clear, as a line-of-sight being cut off or not. A complex idea becomes simple geometry of intersecting straight lines. No new type of thinking is needed to represent the idea of clear. Its represented in the 2d visual grid using geometry, and more than that, as many memories of looking through glass.

I've explained how ideas of 3d objects are made of relative positions and rotations of other 3d objects, like the idea of an elephant is made of the elephant's parts in relative positions to each other, and each part is made of smaller parts. In the next thought-experiment, we will learn that brains can think in fractals by curving a hierarchy around to loop into itself. In math, that's called turning a "tree" into a "directed network".

This thought-experiment is about fractals. Think of an apple with small bananas pointing out from its surface. On each banana there are smaller apples. Like the elephants thought-experiments, the bananas are blurry or do not appear until you pay attention to the specific part of the apple where they should be, and recursively for the smaller apples on each banana. This is a directed-network of apple points at repeat_banana points at banana points at repeat_apple points at apple2. You don't see bananas on the smaller apples until you decide that apple and apple2 are the same object. That's how you change the hierarchy into a fractal. Then it goes as deep, apple banana apple banana etc, as you choose to look into it. It displays on your visual neurons as a fractal. Directed-networks with cycles are fractals. Directed networks without cycles are hierarchies, also known as trees. A man may sleep with many women who each sleep with many men. That is also a fractal because its a directed network with a cycle between man and woman.

How the same object can be drawn at different parts of the 2d visual grid. How is the part selected? Whichever part of the 2d grid is most active or has the closest pattern to the object to be drawn, as in matching a pattern from a partial pattern.

What makes Humans smarter than animals the most is their ability to create new "types of thinking" in their minds. Example: Probability/statistics is something we did not evolve to think. We estimate chances in a very inaccurate way. Most people answer the following question wrong: If I flipped 2 coins and at least 1 coin landed heads, then whats the chance both landed heads? Its 1/3, not 1/4 or 1/2 like most people think, because there are 4 ways 2 coins can land and I only excluded "both tails" when I said "at least 1 landed heads" so that leaves 3 possibilities and I asked what is the chance of 1 of those 3 things. Its 1/3. If you still don't believe it, flip 2 coins many times and only ask the question when at least 1 of them lands heads and you will see that 1/3 of the time you ask the question they both land heads. The flaw in Human minds is the need to choose 1 of the coins and say it certainly landed heads, but you can't do that since whichever coin you choose it may have landed tails, and it does change the answer to the question if you take that shortcut. This is the simplest example where AI usually beats Humans at a common sense question.

The "type of thinking" called probability, if understood and used at an intution level and as a permanent part of your thinking, is 1 of the main things that separates geniuses from average people. Its so nonintuitive that most people answer the 2 coin question (as I wrote above) wrong. 2 coins are not important, but what is important is what it means about your understanding of the combination of any 2 events. Most people estimate the chance of "both events happened" (or "both landed heads") as 1/2 or 1/4 chance instead of 1/3, and that is why gambling is illegal in many places... People are so bad at understanding the combination of 2 events that they feel a need to protect each other from their own lack of understanding of probability.

Everything I've written can be summarized into these "types of thinking":
* grid of numbers, where number could be brightness, loudness, electricity, how much, how relevant, etc.
* single point on a dimension.
* directed-network (of nodes pointing at nodes) with optional cycles, where nodes can be ideas, wildcards, or anything else your brain can represent.
* idea is a directed-network where each node (neuron in this case) has a specific electricity amount, plus the patterns those neurons tend to have depending on what electricity they receive.

Smell and taste are unordered numbers, an amount of each type of thing you smell or taste, a group of "single point on a dimension".

Your skin is a directed-network where each node is what each part of your skin can feel, and the connections are which parts of skin are next to which other parts of skin. The network forms that way when things rub across your skin. Skin that is beside other skin gets associated together that way. Pain in the skin (or other pain) activates certain neurons that release chemicals which cause neurons to learn the reverse of what they just learned (at least that's my theory), to avoid the pain later. Ideas form in directed-networks and goals are formed by avoiding things that lead to memories of pain and working toward things that lead to memories of pleasure. A directed-network can represent recursion, goals, relationships between ideas, and many other things.

Vision is a 2d grid connected to the 3d+1 grid which is really an 18d+2d grid when you include position, rotation, speed, acceleration, and time.

Sound is a 2d grid of tone and time.

All grids connect to all other grids as associations are made. Any idea or pattern can associate to any other, and such associations become usable as an idea that activates a directed-network. Example: Some of my ideas cause me to use my vision more than my hearing, and some cause me to use my movement and space/time skills more (like basketball). There are ideas which activate directed-networks (with amounts for each node) to influence how your brain operates at a high level. Information flows in many patterns, high to low and low level to high, and sometimes in fractal patterns, always learning from the top level goal of avoid memories of pain and go for memories of pleasure.

That is half of Human intelligence. The other half can be evolved with artificial intelligence applied to figuring out which patterns of simulated electricity in neural networks tend to create these thought patterns. Start with a simple 3d simulation, where the AI can see in whatever direction it points its simulated head, and put some cubes, triangles, straight lines, and things similar to baby's toys in the simulation, and first get the AI to represent positions and rotations of those simple objects. After that, add some more senses, and get it to learn ideas like counting, which objects are equal to which other objects, movement, acceleration, and so on... Teach the AI the same way you would teach a Human baby. What I've described is how Human intelligence works but is specific enough you could evolve an AI (artificial intelligence) to do the same thing, if you had enough processing speed and memory. It takes a lot of processing speed and memory because the sparse grids of relative object positions, which form memories as recursive objects and ideas, form a new memory for each rotation, each acceleration, each stretching, of such objects. Human brains are a huge cache repeating variations of the same objects and ideas, forming patterns based on such caches, and exploring those patterns. You need a lot of cpu speed and memory for it. On 1 computer, start by trying to simulate a parrot. Get it to listen through the microphone and make parrot sounds, and eventually learn to talk by example of you talking through the microphone. A 1 ghz computer should be able to simulate a parrot brain, probably 1 of the dumber parrots. For Human intelligence, you need a lot more, but we do have more than enough computers connected to the internet and running right now, if we would combine them for such a Human simulation.

I do not mean this writing as a complete explantion of Human intelligence, only as some examples of how to observe your own mind and figure out the rest. To explain everything I know about Human intelligence would be very long and I may have some problems putting it into words. The best way to learn how Human intelligence works is to start with your visual neurons, "what we think our eyes see", and work backward from there with thought-experiments. The scientists with their billions of dollars of research will catch up to us eventually, but by then we will have already created the specific kind of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity that we want. I hope we can agree on what kind we want, because there may not be much time left to choose. Human intelligence is simply directed-networks of ideas and wildcards, and grids, and single points on dimensions. With a design that simple, exceeding Human intelligence in a machine, or amplifying it through machines and the internet, is closer than most people think.

[Bedeekin]

Nice.

Being a modelmaker/concept designer/sculptor... I can roll with the visual analogies.

I have conditioned myself to see an object from another persons description in perfect 3D... to deconstruct it into any separate components it has... work out how to construct these components and what to make them from... virtually on-the-fly.

As a practitioner of OOBEs who ... how do you think this model works when it comes to the 'metaphysical' environment?

I direct my 'minds-eye' to conceive and then construct a model... but during most OOBEs I encounter environments that are as real as 'here'... there I have full tactile senses and enhanced analytical ability. A lot of time during some experiences is spent figuring out what I am looking at; at first I sometimes get it wrong (I think I'm looking at an easter bonnet sticking at a right angle from the wall on a stand of some sort) and realise I was viewing an object from a bizarre angle (when it was infact the lampshade on my ceiling). So how do you think I am creating an object that I at first I mis-interpreted?

[beavis]

How does my model of Human intelligence connect to metaphysical things?

A little of that is explained around where I said "Telekinesis (moving things with your mind) starts using the 3d+1d grid in a very general way, with a centered mind. In my mind I see a 3d moving field, a smooth surface, without colors, and my thoughts bend it in complex ways."

More generally, I think an approximate duplicate of your Human brain's thought patterns (but not the shape of the brain) forms out of something other than atoms, whatever the astral is made of. Many of these approximate duplicates of your mind flow together, and they're only partial duplicates, each leaving out important parts of your mind, but together they are a good approximation of your mind. They flow between your brain and astral and other parts of the universe, mixing your mind with others' minds and other things, painting the universe with consciousness.

When you experience moving back into your body, it doesn't mean these approximate partial duplicates of your mind have gone back into your body, but some of them could. Instead it means the information that is your current part of consciousness is transmitted through the network of these approximate partial duplicates, continuously between them until the information gets back to your brain. You are not in your body or not. You are many places at once, some more than others.