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".
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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