What is real?

Our brains are computers. Filtering information based on our beliefs and patterns. This is incredible insight, once you grasp it. Think of the Matrix when Morpheus was explaining to NEOwhat reality truly is. Here's a link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGZiLMGdCE0



Consider this from a well known Danish scientist.


Tors Norretranders is a Danish science journalist, who attempts to tie together the results of several scientists into an explanation of how consciousness works. He comes at it from an information processing point of view, treating the human brain as a computer, while pulling in results from all over the world of science. He goes from Maxwell-Boltzmann thermodynamics to information theory to Godel's incompleteness theorem in the first 50 pages to give you an idea of the intellectual ground he covers.
The basic premise that he puts together is that consciousness, the actual thought process where we think about what we are doing, is a very slow inefficient process. His estimate, based on several experiments, is that consciousness is limited to processing about 20 bits/second. Compared to the chips of today which are up in the gigahertz range (billions of bits/second), it seems like a truly paltry number. How can we reconcile this with our known ability to outperform computers at many tasks?
Norretranders postulates that most of the work is done at a subconscious level. Nothing too surprising, there. But what was interesting to me was the approach he used. In his theory, the whole point of the subconscious parts of the brain is to reduce the information flow into and out of the brain down to a rate which our feeble 20 bits/sec consciousness can handle. He points out that we perceive about 12 million bits/second (10 million from vision, 1 million from touch, and the rest scattered among the other senses). That's an enormous amount of information to process. But when we look around, we don't see 10 million pixels. Looking from my computer chair, I see my computer, my desk, the windows of the room, etc. He calls this phenomenon chunking information into symbols. To quote him, "symbols are the Trojan horses by which we smuggle bits into our consciousness."

Think about That.