Send us a text

Episode 26 - The model in the brain
All the things you experience appear to be feeding directly into your brain. What is actually happening is that the brain is receiving all the signals and then interpreting them into a model of the world, then projecting an image of that model into the conscious part of your mind. This is why you are conscious of some sensations and not others.
We do not know that anyone else is conscious but we tend to believe that they are if they act in a way that we recognize as a way in which we ourselves act. That is, the closer their responses to the world are to our own responses to the world the more we feel that we "relate" to them. This is just as true of animals and computers as it is of humans.
Rene Descartes was working on this problem when he essentially gave up attempting to determine whether anyone aside from himself was a real, conscious person and said "Cogito ergo sum", or "I think therefore I am".
What does this mean for our interpretation of our world? Each person has a limited number of people they can "know". For each of the people you "know" you have a model in your brain of what sorts of decisions/actions you believe they would take. You can imagine yourself in a situation with them because of this model.
Your model of each other person is necessarily incomplete. The tendency is to fill in the unknown gaps in the model of another person with things about yourself. This is (probably) the root of the thing known as "projection".

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection