[visarga]

We have a dual search loop - outside, we act using our experience to gain new data. Inside, we compress this data and update our experience. We search for experience and search for understanding. Acting is search for new insights, learning is search for error minimization.

I think the way we encode our experiences is relationally, like neural networks. We relate new experiences against past experiences, this creates a semantic space that is highly dimensional. Any concept is a point or a region in this space. It has consistent semantics, which leads to the unified experience. We can relate anything to anything in this space without having a central understander. Encoding your own experiences creates a first person perspective from 3rd person data, which was always a "hard" problem to explain in philosophy.

The serial action bottleneck adds to the illusion of centralization. But it's still a distributed process, no neuron is conscious or understands by itself. And even in society, no human can recreate even a 1% of human culture individually. We are not that smart on our own. We should always look for the larger context where we develop, not just the brain.

Search has the virtue of not hiding the environment, it is social and distributed, unlike more personal concepts like consciousness, intelligence and understanding. But as I said above, even inside the brain there is nothing but distributed processing, no homunculus.

I think the core of my argument is "there is no centralized consciousness, understanding or intelligence, they are distributed processes, they act across neurons in the brain and across people in society". It seems like a hard pill to swallow, if that is true then there is also no centralized understanding or truth.

[smokedetector1]

I commend your diligence, your theory may even be internally consistent, but I don't see why I should believe this rather than the comparatively simple and intuitively true (to me, anyway) notion that there is a genuine soul, it has its own volition, and it certainly interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently (and may always be) mysterious.

[visarga]

What you say that the soul acts like a homunculus, "interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently mysterious". It is a "center" thing that has volition, and semantics, and is genuine.

And it is understandable to do so. It certainly feels unified, and genuine. And it is simple and nice to be so. But intuition fails us hard when it comes to introspection. We feel alive, and conscious, but we are a few billion neurons connected by trillion branches, all wrapped in a bio-robot, put inside a complex environment full of living things in a state of cooperation and competition.

[smokedetector1]

Again, that is your theory. Just because you've created it using the primitives of materialist science doesn't mean it's true or that it's more likely than another theory. The fact is there's no scientific basis for believing what you've said. There just isn't.

If it feels like there's a scientific basis for what you're saying, that's because you're invoking the metaphysical principle of strict materialism, which is a common (though not inherently valid) way of thinking about science, and if that were true then yes, something like your theory would have to be true.

But be clear - that is not something proven by science, it is an axiom that is far from obviously true or universally accepted.

It may also feel that your theory should be true because so much about how the body and brain works is, I agree, materialist in nature, so why not hypothesize that everything is materialist? But that is very much a hypothesis and an intuition, not something that is scientifically proven or logically forced. And, as you say, intuition can be flawed.