The Mind is Flat | Nick Chater | Talks at Google 

Brilliant complementary material to the book. Smart questions in the end that help with understanding. A clever and thought-provoking idea. One thought at the time, of course :)

Great talk, well done Nick and the book is excellent!

Corollary : each morning we wake up anew, then we slowly remember who we were yesterday and we spend the day doing what we are supposed to do. And when we talk, the brain checks : "That is what would say", and we say it.

43:16 I've often referred to it like shaking a Magic 8-Ball and looking at the window to see what shows up.

Cool shit, thanks for this talk.

I’m about halfway through love it so far. Even tho “Just improvising my self here” scares me, but simultaneously feels liberating. Very Mindfulness, third wave CBT (leave your presumptions behind, thoughts are merely interpretations), if you reduct the notion of one’s self as something continuous and stable. Damn I love science...

It's not the imposing of organization on the world. The room you are in "feels" complete even when you can't see all of it at once (you have an idea of what the room behind you looks like, even if you can't build a detailed picture in your mind). The illusion takes advantage of the narrow area of the retina that can see detail. BUT, like the "improv," everything is based on patterns. It's easier for us to recognize a solid line than a fuzzy or curved line. It's why we see the shape of a face so readily. The words your mind reaches for are based on the words you know, and the ones that are most associated with whatever you just heard or spoke. "I can't get no.." will match a pattern in most minds that triggers the same next word. That is not improv.

At 12:45, he states that if we are concentrating on red, we can't combine it with other colours to find the shape. But I wonder if I can. At least partly. If I concentrate on the red, I can clearly see its shape, and the yellow shape and combine them. Blue and green are blurred. So it may be more complicated than what he says.

wow!

The ‘landscape’ metaphor - individual rain drops sequentially carving out erosion patterns as they run down a hillside, with each new rain drop carving out whatever particular ‘ditch’ it’s running down a little deeper or with a slight new twist in it ... or not - is straight from Edward de Bono’s ‘The Mechanism of Mind’ .... What this chap fails to realise is that the ‘slopes’ (prejudices) in one’s mind are set at their various angles rather early in childhood, not to omit the fact that the human mind will have a different ‘hillside’ for every different realm of experience .....

Belief/conditioning underpins what we perceive.

With 2D emotions being interpreted depending on environment, that may explain why we sometimes wanna change where we sit while working...🤔

Some philosophy and gaming thoughts … Various philosophy emphasises self awareness, being aware of thoughts and thinking about thinking, it's interesting that there may be more noise in this process than people are aware of, I'd still imagine intention and practise helps. I think gaming can give awareness about what areas are easier and less easy to mentally parallelise and of strategies for buffering of concentration between discrete tasks, all of this probably to a greater or lesser extent varies from person to person. From experience among differing platforms and styles I can report that the colourful modes in AudioSurf, rather than the mode with just orange and grey, was a complete mentally conflicting mindfuck for me when I tried it, whereas something like balancing the bike in various ways in x-moto can be made quite background. Also the only race level I couldn't complete in Trackmania Nations was that one that takes an hour to complete because I found no strategy to hold frequent bursts of concentration for that long. Super Hexagon is another interesting one, as are the 3 second challenge type games where the tasks are not hard and even share just a few keys and a very simple graphical style, but you repeatedly only have a moment (a psychological "moment", literally) to understand, figure it out and do it. It's perhaps hardly surprising but it may be notable how much of Euclidea is played mentally while not playing it, particularly how blind I am to my immediate surroundings while doing so, while being in the minds eye as it were. I've experienced what others have subsequently reported, that the environmental puzzles in The Witness are far easier when watching gameplay footage than when you even have a hand on the keys, it's like with computer programming when the solution is suddenly there in your mind when you stop trying to solve the problem. The card game Magic the Gathering seems to teach the skill also useful in science/math of being able to pay attention when needed to the wording of statements and not always mentally simplify them to there intention to mentally reconstruct subtly wrongly later. It's full of situations where your trying to work out how your card makes everything indestructible given that there card destroys only indestructible things and theres already a card in play that makes you loose the game if you win it, etc…

How come he said at the end that he believes in free will after showing that are brain is all subconscious processes that we do not control?

Flat mind blowing theory.

His work has some good, but his conclusions are unsubstantiated by it, is circular and overreaching. It's the same with evolutionary biology, everything (and and anything) can be explained by drawing from a conclusion the preceding premises for what concluded in it you're basically using Occam's Duct Tape. Petitio Principii.

I hear yanny!

I disagree about the color stuff. It's clear at a glance that there's 4 colors of squares. It's easy to compare the sets of squares row by row instead of just by color. For example, the bottom is red-green-yellow-blue.

How far do you take language before you decide what is reality? Basic. Is is. Could it be an Egyptian tautology? or Ebonics you have Be beez. Think that was a rap hit? Make mine Gurdjieff. Do the work.

This video will provoke outrage from believers in subconscious.

It will be better to say the Mind is nearly Flat.

Perhaps the drawings of the mind 'is' flat, like all drawings - but I doubt that this is more than a flat representation. This 'is' not a mind...

first 20m useful, rest is conjecture

Mr. Chater seemingly has himself become La Invencion de Morel. A scientist who's island and machines are full of serious problems. . .perhaps even dooming himself to becomes his own ghost in the machine.

Globe mind conspiracy!!!

Nick will make lot of people very angry.

15:47 didn’t know this before, i was blind and now i see, kinda

I don't particularly like being told what I experience. Alot of assumptions being made here. I agree with the broad premise.

Completely discounts the connections between his examples. Seems completely wrongheaded. It's like denying consciousness altogether. What about the software? There is no software, the mind is not robust that way, only a clump of heuristics. An illusion. But there's no point to bridging the details in between. That's what this talk and this book says. No links, hence it's flat. This is where behaviorism runs awry, because it likes to cut explanations short for the sake of convenience of results. Cognitive science and neuroscience beg to differ. Ethology begs to differ. Pray tell the difference between humans and apes. Between both primates versus fish or insects. If he were asked "what's it like to be a bat?" Mr. Chater would suggest quite likely: "to be human with more and better heuristics." A bad answer that belies the evidence.

Nick seems to think that he has the unique and transcendental ability to provide non-improvised and non-rationalized explanations of why the subjects of his experiments behave the way they do. This is just warmed-over Behaviorism. Behaviorism 3.0. Who conditions the conditioner who conditions the subject?

Nick ,you are smart guy but your book is written in diffult laungue!!!!!!!!!!!! Sorry

Not very excited about his absolute presuppositions. Freud. Ho Hum. No hint of work on Self or conscious evolution. Almost mechanical in description. OK for assuming how the masses see as a projection. If you dont deal with some idea of spiritual gifts of unique individuals, it is just the same old crap wearing new cloths.

The earth is flat as well!