The Neuroscience of Reality

[Philip Thrift]

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

[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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[Bruno Marchal]

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[Bruno Marchal]

Oops, sorry for the previous post.

On 2 Sep 2019, at 10:56, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> 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 better starting point. It is better to start on what we agree on, and then reason, that adopting some implicit metaphysics.

Bruno

[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

[Brent Meeker]

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

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

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

Evgenii

[Brent Meeker]

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

Brent

[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

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