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Finally, the vision scientists figured out what was going on. It wasn’t our computer screens or our eyes. it was mental calculations that brains do when we see. Some people unconsciously deduced that the dress was in direct light and mentally removed the yellow from the image, so they saw blue and black stripes. Others saw him in a shade dominated by bluish light. Their brains mentally removed the blue from the image and found a white and gold dress.
Thinking doesn’t just filter reality; it constructs an outside world by inferring from uncertain inputs. Inside to be youAnil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, relates his explanation of “how the inner universe of subjective experience relates to and can be explained by the biological and physical processes that occur in brains and bodies.” He claims to have “experience”. to be youor being me emerges from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body.”
Forecasting has become fashionable in academic circles in recent years. Philosopher Andy Clark, a colleague in Seth and Sussex, refers to predictions made by the brain as follows: “controlled hallucinations.” The idea is that the brain is always building models of the world to explain and predict incoming information; It updates these models when the experience we derive from our prediction and sensory inputs diverges.
“Chairs are not red,” Seth writes, “just as they are not ugly, old-fashioned, or avant-garde… The redness I experience when I look at a red chair depends on both the chair’s characteristics and its characteristics. my brain. It corresponds to the content of a set of perceptual predictions about how a particular type of surface reflects light.”
Seth isn’t particularly interested in redness, or even color in general. Rather, his larger claim is that the same process applies to all perception: “All perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that is subjugated to the world through the constant making and re-creation of perceptual best guesses, controlled hallucinations. You could even say that we all hallucinate constantly. Only when we agree on our hallucinations do we call it reality.”
Cognitive scientists often rely on atypical examples to understand what’s really going on. Seth introduces the reader to an entertaining ritual of optical illusions and spectacles, some quite familiar and some less familiar. Squares that are actually the same shade look different; spirals printed on paper appear to spin on their own; an ambiguous image appears as a woman kissing a horse; A face appears on the bathroom sink. Recreating the psychedelic powers of the mind in silicon, an AI-powered virtual reality setup he and his colleagues created is producing a Hunter Thompson-like zoo of animal parts emerging piecemeal from other objects in a square on the University of Sussex campus. In Seth’s account, this series of examples dispels “the deceptive but useless intuition that consciousness is one thing – a great eerie mystery that seeks one great terrifying solution.” Seth’s perspective may be troubling for those who prefer to believe that everything is as it seems: “Free will experiences are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception.”
Seth is on relatively firm ground in describing how the brain shapes experience, what philosophers call “easy” problems with consciousness. They are easy only when compared to the “hard” problem: why does subjective experience exist as a property of the universe. Here he walks clumsily, posing the “real” problem of “explaining, predicting, and controlling the phenomenological features of conscious experience.” It’s not clear how the real problem differs from easy problems, but somehow, he says, tackling it will show us a way on the way to solving the hard problem. Now that would be a nice trick.
Where Seth is mostly concerned with the experiences of people whose typical brains are plagued by atypical stimuli, Coming to Our SensesSusan Barry, professor emeritus of neurobiology at Mount Holyoke College, tells the story of two people who acquire new senses later in life than usual. Nearly blind since infancy, Liam McCoy was able to see almost clearly after a series of surgeries at the age of 15. Zohra Damji was extremely deaf until she got a cochlear implant at an unusually late age, 12 years old. As Barry explains, Damji’s surgeon “tells his aunt that if she knew the length and extent of Zohra’s deafness, she wouldn’t have done the surgery. Barry’s compassionate, nuanced, and observant narration is informed by his own experience:
At the age of forty-eight, I experienced a dramatic improvement in my vision, a change that gave me repeated moments of childlike joy. Squint from early childhood, I saw the world mainly with one eye. Then, in the middle of life, I learned to use my eyes together through a vision therapy program. With every glance, everything I saw took on a new look. I could see the volume and 3-dimensional shape of the empty space between things. Tree branches stretched toward me; light fixtures flew. Visiting the product section of the supermarket with all its colors and 3D shapes can lead me to some kind of enthusiasm.
Barry was overjoyed at his new abilities, which he described as “seeing in a new way.” He points out how different this is from “seeing it for the first time.” A sighted person can grasp a scene at a glance. “But where we perceive a three-dimensional landscape full of objects and people, a new seeing adult sees intricate lines and patches of color appearing on a flat plane.” As McCoy describes his experience going up and down the stairs to Barry:
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