A Brain Scan Thought Experiment

You’re sitting down with an apparatus connected to your head. On a screen on the nearby wall you are watching a live feed of your brain activity. In some fashion, displayed on the screen, is the encoded information for all of your conscious experiences, including the experience of looking at the information on the screen.

So, included in the code is the experience of looking at the code, which means….the code has the code itself encoded inside it? And in that second layer of code would also be the code for the experience of seeing the code. And so on.

How far down would this go?

I have a feeling this experiment might not actually work out the way I think it will, but at the moment I can’t spot the error.

Somehow the lag in the feed would be factored into this. Because it would take a bit of time for the machine to pull data from your nervous system and then display it. So…you’d be seeing an encoded version of….what you just saw a moment ago I guess. I think the experiment still works, even taking this into account.