Thank you for the thoughtful comments. I am not certain that the approach that I am suggesting will be successful but I am hoping that more complex experiences may be explainable from simpler essences, similar to the behaviour of fluids from simpler atomic rules. I am currently focused on the assumption that the brain is similar to a modern reinforcement learning algorithm where there is a one or more large learnt structures and a relatively simple learning algorithm. The first thing I am hoping to look at is if all the concious experiences could be explained purely by behaviours associated with the learning algorithm. Even better if in trying to do this it indicates new structures that the learning algorithm should take. For example, we have strong memories of sad events and choices we regret, this implies we rank the importance of past experiences based on these situations and weight them more heavily when learning from them. We might avoid a stategy because our intuition says it makes us sad (it is like other situations that made us sad) rather than it simply being a poor strategy to achieve our goals.
Thank you for the thoughtful comments. I am not certain that the approach that I am suggesting will be successful but I am hoping that more complex experiences may be explainable from simpler essences, similar to the behaviour of fluids from simpler atomic rules. I am currently focused on the assumption that the brain is similar to a modern reinforcement learning algorithm where there is a one or more large learnt structures and a relatively simple learning algorithm. The first thing I am hoping to look at is if all the concious experiences could be explained purely by behaviours associated with the learning algorithm. Even better if in trying to do this it indicates new structures that the learning algorithm should take. For example, we have strong memories of sad events and choices we regret, this implies we rank the importance of past experiences based on these situations and weight them more heavily when learning from them. We might avoid a stategy because our intuition says it makes us sad (it is like other situations that made us sad) rather than it simply being a poor strategy to achieve our goals.