On 9/4/2013 10:00 AM, Chris de Morsella wrote:
*From:* meekerdb <[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected]
*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.
Brent
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