________________________________
From: meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net>
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2013 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On 9/3/2013 3:43 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote:
By the way the brain produces high fidelity illusions for us most of our waking
lives. For example the way we perceive our sight is very different from the
intermittent stream of neural signals that begin their journey from our
retinas. Did you know that every time you shift your eyes from one focus point
to another that during the period of time the eyeball is in movement from one
focus to the next no visual signals are being sent down the optic nerve. That
if the brain was not producing an illusion for us the world we see should
vanish each time we move our eyes (or blink them) Does the world disappear each
time you blink or move your eyes? Of course it doesn't. Your mind maintains a
steady and beautifully rendered illusion of the world in your mind that is
seamlessly stitched into the new stream of optic signals as they arrive. There
is no discontinuity.
>> That seems to look at it the wrong way around. Our model of the
world is one in which objects are persistent even when we don't look
at them. That's a better model than one in which they only exist
when we look at them. So our brain is creating the better model
instead of the worse. I see no reason to call that an "illusion".
It is an illusion in the sense that it is manufactured by the brain. The brain
fills in the gaps in the stream of visual signals with a manufactured world
that does not in fact exist -- as a stream of in-coming sense data. But you are
correct that it is a better way to model the world; I am not arguing that it
isn't. I agree that evolution would favor a "vision" that did not suddenly
switch off every time the eye stopped sending signals. My point is that the
world we see is in many ways a manufactured illusion -- and model (we agree on
that term) -- of the world.
The same is true for how when we turn our heads the world does not spin but
rather our brain cleverly re-renders our visual world by changing our own inner
viewpoint from which we perceive our sight -- as our brains have served it up
to us. This is also a better way to model a change in the direction of vision.
Instead of spinning the world as would be the case if the brain had not
re-interpreted the visual data stream and re-rendered it in this alternate
manner; we perceive our visual field as being stable and our perception of this
stable field being the factor that shifts instead. This brain illusion -- after
all, it is manufactured internally by the brain itself and is a different and
highly interpretive rendition of the raw data going into the brain -- also
seems a clearly superior way to model vision than the alternative of staying
true to reality, which would have the world radically spin each time you
shifted your gaze from here to there or
turned your head... imagine how disorienting that would be.
We both agree that it makes evolutionary sense for the brain to model reality
like it does -- in terms of these visual tricks the mind is doing. My point was
that the mind is clearly capable of producing masterful illusions and does so
each and every single day in healthy individuals. We depend on our minds innate
ability to produce high fidelity illusions -- or models if you will -- of the
underlying world that we are perceiving via our senses, and we depend on our
conjuring mental acrobats each and every day of our lives.
In general, we need on our brains to filter out by far most of what impinges on
our senses, and if it did not, we would suffer under a cacophony of sensorial
overload. Our brains however are masters of illusion (or if you prefer of
models that while tied to and dependent on reality are also fundamentally
divergent form how reality would present to us if it were not reified by our
brains into the way we sense it).
Brent
>When you turn your head from one side to the other does the world spin? --
>the world around you is instead held in a majestic stability that is not real,
>because it should be instead spinning as your head spins. Instead in our
>perception the world stays stable and it is our "perspective" -- our inner
>view -- that shifts. This makes sense from the point of view of the inner
>observer, but the mind needs to do a lot of work to build the illusion.
>Our brains are, grand masters of illusion and we live in illusion (a
>reification of sensorial reality) all our waking lives.
>
>The perfection of our visual illusion is a masterpiece of interpretive
>processing where the raw signals we get are stitched together into a field of
>view and a focus within that field of view that -- though it clearly is
>reflective of our sensorial reality is also quite different; the "world" we
>see is very different than the world as it is recorded on our eyeballs (even
>to the extent of smoothly persisting without the barest hint of any
>interruption even as our eyes are not seeing a single thing at all.
>
>Cheers,
>-Chris
>
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