Welcome to this week’s existential crisis moment: are we merely characters of our own creation? What if we are just merely living in a sci-fi-esque simulation as a random fictional character, subject to the whims of the writer of this story?
Nick Chater believes this to be true. According to him, our moment-by-moment stream of consciousness is technically us writing our autobiography. He also cites modern scientific fields such as neuroscience, psychology, and AI as pushing toward this narrative. “The conclusion that the stories we tell ourselves about our motives, beliefs, and values are not merely unreliable in their specifics but are fictitious through and through. They are improvisations, created in retrospect by the astonishing story-spinner that is the human mind,” he explained further.
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