One bite-sized thought the occurs to me is that maybe this coupling of the Player and the Character is one of the many things accomplished by dreaming. The mind-system confabulates bizarre and complex scenarios, drawn in some sense from the distribution of possible but not highly probable sensory experiences. The Player provides an emotional reaction to these scenarios—you’re naked in school, you feel horrifying levels of embarrassment in the dream, and the Character learns to avoid situations like this one without ever having to directly experience it.
I think that dreaming does this sort of thing in a general way, by simulating scenarios and using those simulations to propagate learning through the hierarchy, but in particular it would seem that viewing the mind in terms of Player/Character gives you a unique closed-loop situation that really bootstraps the ability of the Character to intuitively understand the Player’s wishes.
Fantastic post; I’m still processing.
One bite-sized thought the occurs to me is that maybe this coupling of the Player and the Character is one of the many things accomplished by dreaming. The mind-system confabulates bizarre and complex scenarios, drawn in some sense from the distribution of possible but not highly probable sensory experiences. The Player provides an emotional reaction to these scenarios—you’re naked in school, you feel horrifying levels of embarrassment in the dream, and the Character learns to avoid situations like this one without ever having to directly experience it.
I think that dreaming does this sort of thing in a general way, by simulating scenarios and using those simulations to propagate learning through the hierarchy, but in particular it would seem that viewing the mind in terms of Player/Character gives you a unique closed-loop situation that really bootstraps the ability of the Character to intuitively understand the Player’s wishes.
Thanks!