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Part II
Origins of suffering:
uncontrollability and uncertainty

The second part will consider how uncontrollable the world as well as the cognitive system itself are, and how an agent’s perceptions and thinking are uncertain and can even be called illusory



8 Emotions and desires as interrupts
 Computation is one aspect of emotions
 Emotions interrupt ongoing processing
 Desire as an emotion and interrupt
 Emtions include hard-wired action sequences
 How interrupts increase suffering
 Emotions are boundedly rational
9 Thoughts wandering by default
 Wandering thoughts and the default-mode network
 Wandering thoughts as replay and planning
 Experience replay focuses on reinforcing events
 Replay exists in rats, humans, and machines
 Wandering thoughts multiply suffering
10 Perception as construction of the world
 Vision only seems to be effortless and certain
 Perception as unconscious inference
 Prior information can be learned
 Illusions as inference that goes wrong
 Attention as input selection
 Subjectivity and context-dependence of perception
 Reward loss as mere percept
 Ancient philosophers on perception
11 Distributed processing and no-self philosophy
 Are you really in control?
 Necessity of parallel and distributed processing
 Central executive and society of mind
 Control as mere percept of functionality
 Philosophy of no-self and no-doer
12 Consciousness as the ultimate illusion
 Information processing vs. subjective experience
 The computational function of human consciousness
 The origin of conscious experience
 Why is simulated suffering conscious?
 Self vs. consciousness
 Nothing is real?

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