Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 103 of 171
Vision as a construction of the brain
cameras that take pictures of this preexisting world. What we see is more or less what is out there in the world. What neuroscience has discovered, however, is that this is not really what is happening. Vision and conscious awareness of the world are constructions of the brain. As I mentioned above, this process turns out to be much closer to Kant’s philosophical idealism, which would predict that our perception of the world is no different from a hallucination or a dream. The world that we perceive is a creation of our own mind, and this creation is only partly based on input from our sensory organs and brain areas. Cognitive and vision scientist Donald Hoffman points out that roughly half of the neurons in the cortex are devoted to vision. This amounts to around fifty billion neurons, and trillions of synapses, engaged in taking pictures of the external world. Why…