Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 109 of 171
The plasticity principle
even if our own private experiences are purely creations of our brains. To paraphrase the late neurobiologist (and Buddhist) Francisco Varela, we are condemned to treat the representations we experience as though they were the world. Will artificial agents that we create also be condemned to treat their representations of the world as though they were the world? We think we have real, so-called veridical, perceptions of reality. But our perceptions are actually no different from hallucinations, dreams, or illusions. All of our normal waking experience is a construction of our brain. While it is not a true representation of the world, it is a useful representation of the world that is always being revised. Miguel Nicolelis calls this “The Plasticity Principle,” a proposition that states that “The representation of the world created by populations of cortical neurons is not fixed, but remains in flux, throughout our lives, continuously adapting itself to new learned experiences, new models of the self, new simulations of the outside world, and newly assimilated tools.”