________________________________ From: meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2013 12:22 PM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On 9/4/2013 10:00 AM, Chris de Morsella wrote: > > >From: meekerdb mailto: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". > First note that I only wrote the three lines above - which is hard to tell from your reply. >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). > >>You're still looking at it backwards, as though there were some alternative that would be *really real* and not an illusion; as though a video camera just recording "everything" would capture the reall real and the would really would spin around when the camera turned and there would be no illusion. My point is that neither one is "reality" but the model your brain (via evolution) is closer approximation to what we denominate "reality". We want reality to have point-of-view invariance, i.e. to be something that is the same from different points of view and as viewed by different people. That's what we mean by "reality", and the brain automatically produces a good approximation of that form middle sized things not moving to fast. For atomic size things or things moving near the speed of light - not so good. I agree -- the single point of view model our brain's adopt when rendering sensorial input is a better model for allowing us to make rapid interpretations of our current environment and be able to decide on courses of action -- even though by the time it gets to the rendition of experience it seems that often the brain has already decided and our "decision" has already been made (whether that is for us or by us I do not pretend to know.. and that depends on what is meant by "I". So clearly the brain is modeling reality in the manner that makes sense from an evolutionary point of view for us... in fact much of what the brain is doing is tossing out -- e.g. suppressing the experience of -- information that it decides is relatively less important for our immediate survival than the sub-set that we actually experience as what we saw, or what we heard, smelled, tasted or felt (and our inner balance/directional (e.g. orientation) and temporal senses as well) Many experiments have born this out with people being functionally blind to the guy walking across their field of vision wearing the gorilla suit when their minds are focused on a complex multi-variant visual task for example. The brain has -- quite correctly in most cases -- decided that that visual information was just a distraction and so suppresses it. One form of meditation I practice is to stop filtering sound - -to relax and let the soundscape I am in impinge on my senses and not be pre-processed through the reification in which our brains connect a sound with a symbolic inner representation of its origin -- for example when we hear a car our brain silently connects the sonic wave patterns coming from that particular location in our 3-D aural landscape mental model with the associated symbolic construct we have constructed over time on our brains for "car"... and then almost invariably (unless you are for example about to cross a street) suppresses that sound. In fact most of the time we never will actually hear that car -- or the million other sounds that our brains helpfully filter out of our sensorial stream. I am not making the argument that there must be some external real world that our senses are perceiving -- though I very much suspect that there is a real world that exists whether or not I am there to observe it.. .maybe not for me, but then if I am not there I would not know that. What instead I was trying to point out is that the realities our individual mind's perceive are highly interpreted renditions -- models of you will -- that have evolved the way they did because they have proven to be the best balance of interpretive rendering of the raw data stream -- and interpolation of missing data to fill in any gaps in the stream. And it is not just at the level of rendering for our single point of view model and tossing out what the brain decides is less relevant or a distraction from what is most immediately important to bring to our "executive" attention. Our perception is very much also colored by our memories and the experiences we have had in our lives. The manner in which say someone perceives a crashing ocean wave will depend in an often profound way on any potential traumatic memory -- say almost drowning in an ocean wave -- associated with that sensory in-coming data stream.... or for example how some individual may view a large black male walking towards them on the street after dark with few people around -- that entire perceptive experience is highly colored (no pun intended) by the subjective associations that the individual doing the perceiving has formed in their brains... and whether the resulting rendered image seems normal or threatening for the individual involved will in large measure depend on their views on race and past experiences (or lack of experiences) with black males. In this case a racial unconscious bias can kick in and people will not even see the actual person walking towards them, but rather a more generic and often less well rendered (with the blackness of the skin and mental memories manufacturing in the actual man's place a more or less menacing figure that their minds supply them to a startling degree. Our brain's are supplying us with our reality and two people immersed in the same environment will often come away with different descriptions of that environment and will experience different realities when immersed in that environmental stream of sense data. Even though the raw sense stream is the same in both cases; the inner mental experience that is "lived" can be very different indeed. Is this bad.. no... nor is it good per se, except in so far as the interpretive model our species has adopted makes good evolutionary sense/ Not trying to apply a value to this; just trying to recognize that this is going on and that our experience of reality is removed from reality by the many layers of our brain's interpretive engines -- working without our conscious knowledge all the time to generate within us our experience of reality. Thus it seems clear to me that "reality" for us at least is conditioned and re-rendered by our inner interpretive layers and that "reality" will and does vary considerably from person/perspective to person/perspective. -Chris Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. 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