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> The reason I linked the split brain experiments is to show that what you think is the reason for making a decision, even if you "remember" the thought processes before can just be wrong. Asking one side to perform an action and asking the other side to explain the reason for performing the action ended up producing some really wild results.

"Can" just be wrong and "produces some" wild results, sure. In the previous comment were claiming they're always fabrications (as, I note, seems to be the case with GPT!), not just that they could be.

The fact that both GPT and the human brain can sometimes fabricate things similarly does not mean the human brain (or GPT for that matter) does this all the time, let alone that they do this equally frequently, or always to equal degrees. The studies might be showing surprising results, but you're greatly exaggerating what the studies actually show.




Memories are always part-fabrications.

Our brain store "key" moments it thinks it is important, then make up the rest of it. But this process is not really trustworthy on the finer details and is extremely receptive to any sort of suggestion because it simply doesn't have any factual data, so happily jumps to anything which seems to fit the narrative. This is especially true in scenarios where you experience strong emotions. Anything feels like to fit (like, someone paints a scenario which creates the same type of emotion) our brain just accepts it as a matter of fact and puts the puzzle in.

It's why implanting false memories is extremely easy and leading questions work so well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique

Anything that you remember from your life is mostly fabrications with a couple of actual memories used as a scaffolding, and your brain just built the rest of the structure around it - constantly changing it.


And yet we have a very hard time believing or accepting this reality, preferring to believe in our own infallibility.


I think some of what is misleading you here is something you think the brain does well, which it does not...

The brain is not a 'good' memory device. It is a really terrible one. Pick up any hard drive and write data to it and it's going to be a massively more faithful and reliable memory device.

Memory is not the power of the brain. Filtering is by far one of our greatest brain powers. At extremely low power levels we can input absolutely massive amounts of sensing data and capture information form noise. For example have someone put up a wall of pictures in a room. When you first see it your brain will capture a bunch of information, but every time after that it turns into more filtered noise you don't capture. And this noise is really easy to switch out with different objects and thoughts. When one of your trickster friends switches out the picture of your grandmother for Hitler, it's exceptionally unlikely you'll notice.

But what's even better about this is when someone points this out to you, how they point it out to you will influence "when you noticed it". If they say something like "We switched out this picture months ago and you noticed it pretty quickly" your brain will rewrite history when you recall this gag later and you will think you noticed it months beforehand unless you go to a pretty significant effort not to be gaslit.




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