Hong’s Cave

Several months ago, we had a very interesting guest speaker on the campus (the Microsoft campus, that is). It was none other than Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. He was actually there to talk about his upcoming (then) computer adventure game. Fortunately, I don’t remember anything about that.

However, what I do remember was his view of the role and function of the human brain. He defined it as a modeling tool (he also talked about how computers act as augmented extensions). This description rang so true to me. I had a similar idea but it wasn’t clear and defined at all. And he made it so clear.

We each have an idea (or a model) of what ourselves and our surroundings (the world) are like. We have formed (and continues to modify) as we grew up, accumulating, processing, and evaluating our interaction (or experiences) with the outside (of the brain) through our sensory systems. Humans have similar shape, dimension, and sensory systems and live on the same planet, so our models (or views) of the world are pretty similar (I think “similar” is the key word, here).

If there were a sentient being somewhere in other galaxy with different dimension, shape and sensory systems (which is very likely), their model of the world would be completely different from ours? How would they act? Can we understand each other?

All these are very fascinating thoughts. I am grateful to Mr. Adams for making things so much clear.