Re: The Neuroscience of Reality

[Bruno Marchal]

Evgenii,

If you have been able to read that paper, maybe you could try to sum up the 
main point? Especially if you find it convincing.

Bruno



> On 5 Sep 2019, at 19:53, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> Didn't read it as it was behind a paywall.
> 
> Brent
> 
> On 9/5/2019 9:58 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
>> And what about the paper in Scientific American? Is it also about a 
>> pseudo-problem? If not, what is the difference?
>> 
>> Evgenii
>> 
>> Am 04.09.2019 um 21:59 schrieb 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 9/3/2019 12:32 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
 It looks like this is yet another virtual world theory, cf.
 
 A Cartoon Epistemology by Steve Lehar
 http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html
>>> 
>>> This is a pseudo-problem created by taking one view (parallel lines 
>>> converge at infinity) and contrasting it to another view (parallel lines 
>>> look parallel) as though the first was "real". Obviously what pattern in on 
>>> your retina is interpreted, and that the parallel lines are interpreted as 
>>> parallel is the useful, shareable one.
>>> 
>>> Brent
>>> 
>> 
> 
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Re: The Neuroscience of Reality

['Brent Meeker' via Everything List]

Didn't read it as it was behind a paywall.

Brent

On 9/5/2019 9:58 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
And what about the paper in Scientific American? Is it also about a 
pseudo-problem? If not, what is the difference?


Evgenii

Am 04.09.2019 um 21:59 schrieb 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List:



On 9/3/2019 12:32 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

It looks like this is yet another virtual world theory, cf.

A Cartoon Epistemology by Steve Lehar
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html


This is a pseudo-problem created by taking one view (parallel lines 
converge at infinity) and contrasting it to another view (parallel 
lines look parallel) as though the first was "real". Obviously what 
pattern in on your retina is interpreted, and that the parallel lines 
are interpreted as parallel is the useful, shareable one.


Brent





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Re: The Neuroscience of Reality

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

And what about the paper in Scientific American? Is it also about a 
pseudo-problem? If not, what is the difference?


Evgenii

Am 04.09.2019 um 21:59 schrieb 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List:



On 9/3/2019 12:32 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

It looks like this is yet another virtual world theory, cf.

A Cartoon Epistemology by Steve Lehar
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html


This is a pseudo-problem created by taking one view (parallel lines 
converge at infinity) and contrasting it to another view (parallel lines 
look parallel) as though the first was "real".  Obviously what pattern 
in on your retina is interpreted, and that the parallel lines are 
interpreted as parallel is the useful, shareable one.


Brent



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Re: The Neuroscience of Reality

['Brent Meeker' via Everything List]

On 9/3/2019 12:32 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

It looks like this is yet another virtual world theory, cf.

A Cartoon Epistemology by Steve Lehar
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html


This is a pseudo-problem created by taking one view (parallel lines 
converge at infinity) and contrasting it to another view (parallel lines 
look parallel) as though the first was "real".  Obviously what pattern 
in on your retina is interpreted, and that the parallel lines are 
interpreted as parallel is the useful, shareable one.


Brent

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Re: The Neuroscience of Reality

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

It looks like this is yet another virtual world theory, cf.

A Cartoon Epistemology by Steve Lehar
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html

Evgenii

Am 03.09.2019 um 08:12 schrieb Russell Standish:

On Mon, Sep 02, 2019 at 01:56:48AM -0700, Philip Thrift wrote:




Reality is constructed by the brain, and no two brains are exactly alike

By Anil K. Seth  (@anilkseth) | Scientific American September 2019 Issue

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-neuroscience-of-reality/



Interesting article. I might just forward this onto another correspondent of 
mine :)




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Re: The Neuroscience of Reality

[Bruno Marchal]

Oops, sorry for the previous post.

> On 2 Sep 2019, at 10:56, Philip Thrift  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Reality is constructed by the brain, and no two brains are exactly alike

As such, this makes not much sense. If reality is constructed by the brains, 
the brains cannot be real, but then what build the brain and were the illusion 
of brains come from. More below.



> 
> By Anil K. Seth  (@anilkseth) | Scientific American September 2019 Issue
> 
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-neuroscience-of-reality/
> 
> 
> ...
> 
> The central idea here is that perception is a process of active 
> interpretation geared toward adaptive interaction with the world through the 
> body rather than a recreation of the world within the mind. The contents of 
> our perceptual worlds are controlled hallucinations, brain-based best guesses 
> about the ultimately unknowable causes of sensory signals. And for most of 
> us, most of the time, these controlled hallucinations are experienced as 
> real. As Canadian rapper and science communicator Baba Brinkman suggested to 
> me, when we agree about our hallucinations, maybe that is what we call 
> reality.

Not bad. Reality is shared fiction. But with mechanism, not all fiction are 
sharable, only those obeying some laws can be shared, and the logic of 
self-reference classifies which one.

Here we have the same problem as above. We have no idea of what are the basic 
assumption, but I do get a feeling from this abstract that some physical 
reality is taken for granted, although that is unclear.



> 
> But we do not always agree, and we do not always experience things as real. 
> People with dissociative psychiatric conditions such as derealization or 
> depersonalization syndrome report that their perceptual worlds, even their 
> own selves, lack a sense of reality. Some varieties of hallucination, various 
> psychedelic hallucinations among them, combine a sense of unreality with 
> perceptual vividness, as does lucid dreaming. People with synesthesia 
> consistently have additional sensory experiences, such as perceiving colors 
> when viewing black letters, which they recognize as not real. Even with 
> normal perception, if you look directly at the sun you will experience the 
> subsequent retinal afterimage as not being real. There are many such ways in 
> which we experience our perceptions as not fully real.
> 
> 
> What this means to me is that the property of realness that attends most of 
> our perceptions should not be taken for granted.

That is wise indeed.



> It is another aspect of the way our brain settles on its Bayesian best 
> guesses about its sensory causes. One might therefore ask what purpose it 
> serves. Perhaps the answer is that a perceptual best guess that includes the 
> property of being real is usually more fit for purpose—that is, better able 
> to guide behavior—than one that does not.

“Better” assumes some reality. Which one?




> We will behave more appropriately with respect to a coffee cup, an 
> approaching bus or our partner’s mental state when we experience it as really 
> existing.
> 
> But there is a trade-off. As illustrated by the dress illusion, when we 
> experience things as being real, we are less able to appreciate that our 
> perceptual worlds may differ from those of others. (The leading explanation 
> for the differing perceptions of the garment holds that people who spend most 
> of their waking hours in daylight see it as white and gold; night owls, who 
> are mainly exposed to artificial light, see it as blue and black.) And even 
> if these differences start out small, they can become entrenched and 
> reinforced as we proceed to harvest information differently, selecting 
> sensory data that are best aligned with our individual emerging models of the 
> world, and then updating our perceptual models based on these biased data. We 
> are all familiar with this process from the echo chambers of social media and 
> the newspapers we choose to read. I am suggesting that the same principles 
> apply also at a deeper level, underneath our sociopolitical beliefs, right 
> down to the fabric of our perceptual realities. They may even apply to our 
> perception of being a self—the experience of being me or of being you—because 
> the experience of being a self is itself a perception.
> 
> This is why understanding the constructive, creative mechanisms of perception 
> has an unexpected social relevance. Perhaps once we can better appreciate the 
> diversity of experienced realities scattered among the billions of perceiving 
> brains on this planet,

I though reality was a brain construct, but then comes a planet?



> we will find new platforms on which to build a shared understanding and a 
> better future—whether between sides in a civil war, followers of different 
> political parties, or two people sharing a house and faced with washing the 
> dishes.

I can share many ideas here with this, but it needs a 

Re: The Neuroscience of Reality

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 2 Sep 2019, at 10:56, Philip Thrift  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Reality is constructed by the brain, and no two brains are exactly alike
> 
> By Anil K. Seth  (@anilkseth) | Scientific American September 2019 Issue
> 
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-neuroscience-of-reality/
> 
> 
> ...
> 
> The central idea here is that perception is a process of active 
> interpretation geared toward adaptive interaction with the world through the 
> body rather than a recreation of the world within the mind. The contents of 
> our perceptual worlds are controlled hallucinations, brain-based best guesses 
> about the ultimately unknowable causes of sensory signals. And for most of 
> us, most of the time, these controlled hallucinations are experienced as 
> real. As Canadian rapper and science communicator Baba Brinkman suggested to 
> me, when we agree about our hallucinations, maybe that is what we call 
> reality.
> 
> But we do not always agree, and we do not always experience things as real. 
> People with dissociative psychiatric conditions such as derealization or 
> depersonalization syndrome report that their perceptual worlds, even their 
> own selves, lack a sense of reality. Some varieties of hallucination, various 
> psychedelic hallucinations among them, combine a sense of unreality with 
> perceptual vividness, as does lucid dreaming. People with synesthesia 
> consistently have additional sensory experiences, such as perceiving colors 
> when viewing black letters, which they recognize as not real. Even with 
> normal perception, if you look directly at the sun you will experience the 
> subsequent retinal afterimage as not being real. There are many such ways in 
> which we experience our perceptions as not fully real.
> 
> 
> What this means to me is that the property of realness that attends most of 
> our perceptions should not be taken for granted. It is another aspect of the 
> way our brain settles on its Bayesian best guesses about its sensory causes. 
> One might therefore ask what purpose it serves. Perhaps the answer is that a 
> perceptual best guess that includes the property of being real is usually 
> more fit for purpose—that is, better able to guide behavior—than one that 
> does not. We will behave more appropriately with respect to a coffee cup, an 
> approaching bus or our partner’s mental state when we experience it as really 
> existing.
> 
> But there is a trade-off. As illustrated by the dress illusion, when we 
> experience things as being real, we are less able to appreciate that our 
> perceptual worlds may differ from those of others. (The leading explanation 
> for the differing perceptions of the garment holds that people who spend most 
> of their waking hours in daylight see it as white and gold; night owls, who 
> are mainly exposed to artificial light, see it as blue and black.) And even 
> if these differences start out small, they can become entrenched and 
> reinforced as we proceed to harvest information differently, selecting 
> sensory data that are best aligned with our individual emerging models of the 
> world, and then updating our perceptual models based on these biased data. We 
> are all familiar with this process from the echo chambers of social media and 
> the newspapers we choose to read. I am suggesting that the same principles 
> apply also at a deeper level, underneath our sociopolitical beliefs, right 
> down to the fabric of our perceptual realities. They may even apply to our 
> perception of being a self—the experience of being me or of being you—because 
> the experience of being a self is itself a perception.
> 
> This is why understanding the constructive, creative mechanisms of perception 
> has an unexpected social relevance. Perhaps once we can better appreciate the 
> diversity of experienced realities scattered among the billions of perceiving 
> brains on this planet, we will find new platforms on which to build a shared 
> understanding and a better future—whether between sides in a civil war, 
> followers of different political parties, or two people sharing a house and 
> faced with washing the dishes.
> 
> 
>  
> 
> @philipthrift
> 
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Re: The Neuroscience of Reality

[Russell Standish]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2019 at 01:56:48AM -0700, Philip Thrift wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Reality is constructed by the brain, and no two brains are exactly alike
> 
> By Anil K. Seth  (@anilkseth) | Scientific American September 2019 Issue
> 
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-neuroscience-of-reality/
> 

Interesting article. I might just forward this onto another correspondent of 
mine :)


-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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