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[Scoops Novel]

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[voliol]

It’s your cranium.

[Scoops Novel]

Metaphorically speaking.

[methylatedspirit]

My interpretation is this:

The mind is a computer, though a very unusual one by our conception of the term "computer".  It's very good on human-dominated tasks like image recognition, approximate Traveling Salesman Problem and text generation. It is very poor at (conventional) computer-dominated tasks like arithmetic, recall of exact values, and long, repetitive operations on a single task (or at least I do). It's typically programmed declaratively (or at least I am), though modern society demands that you have the capacity to be programmed imperatively.

It runs an OS with a soft real-time kernel. This OS never fully shuts down in the long span from birth to death. This presents an obvious problem for updates, so instead, during a phase called "sleep", something above the kernel turns off most IO (ideally), shuts down all non-vital functions, and lets the mind wander through now-uninitialized memory. This traversal of uninitialized memory often manifests as a "dream" or "nightmare". During sleep, it compiles new versions of the kernel and its userland with the day's patches applied. When "waking up", the super-kernel hands off control to the main kernel.

The mind's architecture is such that is that it has a main CPU, but delegates many functions off to co-processors. The quirk here is that it is entirely possible for the co-processors to not communicate at all with the main CPU. This is good if these are the unconscious functions like heartbeat regulation, but detrimental when the co-processors in question relate to higher social functions like facial processing. This can lead to odd situations where a person can smile, entirely appropriately for the current situation, yet have no conscious control over it. (No, seriously, I experience this exact same thing all the time, it's getting weird)

[voliol]

I think you’ll have to further explain the concept, it doesn’t really get through with just one one vague sentence. Or is this some sort of variant of Plato’s cave of shadows? In which case isn’t the globe inside your mind the one which you percieve, what you identify as ”the real globe” if you don’t put any further thought into it?

Oh goshdarn I was sniped.

[Scoops Novel]

Your perception of reality is just part of your mind.

[TamerVirus]

It’s worlds all the way down

[MrRoboto75]

If you're bored, you can try rotating a cow in your mind.

It's free, and the cops can't stop you.

[King Zultan]

But what if you don't have a mind to put a globe in?

[dragdeler]

There is such thing as the globe of the mind and there is no world inside. There are only filthy malevolant monkeys passing of their  glimmer of intent as obliviousness when you push them with their nose into their own shit.

[Starver]

something above the kernel turns off most IO (ideally), shuts down all non-vital functions, and lets the mind wander through now-uninitialized memory. This traversal of uninitialized memory often manifests as a "dream" or "nightmare". During sleep, it compiles new versions of the kernel and its userland with the day's patches applied.

...my long-time theory is that dreaming is what happens when you allow your swapfile, cluttered up each day, to be defragmented. Or perhaps the systemised backup of assorted temp files/odds'n'sods to your tape storage device.

(Not that anybody really has time/needs to do those things, these days, under most circumstances.)

[KittyTac]

Dreams are like watching the pretty patterns in the disk defrag window.

[methylatedspirit]

I still hold that dreams are caused by deallocating almost all memory, marking it executable, then executing its data as instructions, ignoring any and all segfaults that may occur. You still have VRAM and a sound input device to produce nice visuals and sound, so it's not completely useless. There's still pretty patterns. Sleep doesn't blank out memory, but it does do funny stuff to it. It's usually less filled than before, but it's not totally blank.

The fact that we tend not to crash outright in this state means that we have really good crash prevention, thus we tend not to wake up by accident. In my world, serious errors must force a wake-up. I now hypothesize that babies wake up all the time when they're sleeping specifically because they're not good at not crashing.

[dragdeler]

I can confirm for a fact that latent inhibition blocks out sound perception (of the low to mid volume but ongoing kind)during sleep. Source: slept next to a BIG ass fan for several weeks, had several weird deeop dream to awake episodes.

[methylatedspirit]

I didn't mean the real sound input from your ears, but this virtual one that gets tapped into when you hear your internal voice and stuff like that. I intended to say that the virtual one is the one that gets used in dreams.