(cognitive science)
“Q: Abstractly speaking, does your brain actually care about what you believe as real reality, or does it just go along with whatever beliefs you hold?”
THE ONE CORRECT ANSWER
Your brain operates by organizing Itself to produce increasingly long time frames of successful prediction, into episodes(identifiers, indexes) of associations (causal relations) that can be stored (remembered) as associations of fragments (sensations, edges, surfaces, objects, movements, paths, backgrounds), including the fascinating bits of eye, head, torso, limb position, movement, direction, speed, space within a location, and associations between present and other locations. (Just (exactly) like a 3D video game). So your brain doesn’t have anything to care about other than organizing inputs from your nerves into an episode that can predict your ability to act in the real world.
So your brain doesn’t care so much as it learns to keep your nervous system from objecting to variations from homeostasis (not objecting) where objecting consists of nerves detecting risk, scarcity, harm, or damage. The very thing you call you is a really tiny bit of your brainstem, not very different from a thermometer, that asks your brain to help it change its condition. Your brain evolved to change the body’s condition. This is why all of your brain, like all brains, evolved from organizing muscles to move: change condition.
Your brain is about as dumb a thing as possible, and from the moment of neural tube formation begins to learn what is related to what, and continues throughout life, with the difference being similar to how babies, children, and youth, teens and young adults, incrementally make sounds, learn a word, put words together, put phrases together, and eventually learn to speak their minds, eventually understand others minds, understand the world, and engage in conversation, and over time learn how to negotiate, convince, narrate, and eventually if possible narrate, or tell stories. This process – in language – is the same for every single thing we learn across the spectrum of what we CAN learn.
This is why we observe the real world so nearly perfectly, but we predict (reason, imagine, fantasize, daydream) how to act in it so poorly. 😉
A nerve does nothing but vibrate at different rates. We have no model of the world. We have only successful prediction of moment to moment to chains of moments, to stories of chains of moments, to sort the world into sights, smells, sounds, touches, etc. As our neurons slowly organize all those vibrations of all those nerves into an order, that we experience as awareness, and that we reflect upon as consciousness.
The brain is really simple really. That’s why it’s even more amazing.