Tags / 20 quotes from 3 sources
#hallucinations
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Inceptionism: neural networks dreaming psychedelic images
But why does the human brain react to LSD the way it does? And, if a machine were to achieve human-like consciousness, would it also react to “digital” LSD and enter an altered state of machine consciousness? Recently, Google’s artificial neural networks for image recognition…
Consciousness is a useful hallucination
Neither brains nor computers carry out computations. Consciousness is a hallucination, albeit a very useful one. And information is an epistemic tool that is a cultural invention rather than a natural entity. Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, argue that the brain doesn’t…
Our brains hallucinate all the time
powers of intelligence. One thing discussions on superintelligence are missing that is fundamental to human brains is hallucination. Human brains hallucinate frequently in many different circumstances, because of certain diseases and on certain types of drugs such as LSD…
Everyday experience as hallucination
this is where LSD enters the picture. It turns out that human consciousness is likely itself a form of hallucination. As I have said, it is a very useful hallucination, but a hallucination nonetheless. LSD and psychedelics may help reveal our normal everyday experience for the…
Recalling an LSD trip fifteen years later
I began to wonder if I would ever return to reality, but the voice in the back of my head reminded me again, “LSD is a drug… it will wear off.” The incredible thing about these experiences is that even now, fifteen years later, I can still recall them vividly as if they had…
Mind, consciousness and hallucination are linked
One of the goals of current AI research is to create “machines with minds in the full and literal sense,” according to Google’s Peter Norvig. Authors like Kurzweil, Rothblatt, and Bostrom think that machines with minds are inevitable, even if the problem of consciousness might…
Waking perception is dreamlike
“The nature and phenomenology of hallucinations can be explained more fruitfully within a framework that accepts that, similarly to hallucinations and dream imagery, normal conscious awareness of the world during wakefulness is a fundamentally subjective and dreamlike…
Hallucinations are real perceptions
The assumption in popular culture and even in much of psychology and neuroscience is that hallucinations are erroneous perceptions in the absence of identifiable external stimuli. When people hallucinate they hear or see things that aren’t “really” there. But hallucinations are…
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…
Hallucination as an unchecked model
Visual awareness is not simply a translation of what our eyes see. Our subjective reality is an internal model that our brain must check against the input coming from our eyes. Hallucinations result when our brain does not check the model thoroughly, or rather when the brain…
How do brains achieve useful hallucinations?
how do our brains achieve useful hallucinations? This is one of the outstanding questions for neuroscience in the coming decades. Changing the underlying assumption that the role of human intelligence is to translate information about the world into veridical representations of…
The structures for hallucination are in all of us
The structures for hallucination are in all of us. For instance, even those who may have barely used their eyes may experience visual hallucinations on LSD. A 1963 study reported:
Blind subjects hallucinate on LSD
It is evident that a normal retina is not needed for the occurrence of LSD-induced visual experiences. These visual experiences do not seem to differ from the hallucinations reported by normal subjects after LSD. Such phenomena occurred only in blind subjects who reported prior…
Trust the speeding bus anyway
Even if our experience of the world is fundamentally no different from a hallucination, we should take our conscious experience of the world very seriously. Hoffman uses the example of seeing a bus speeding toward us as we walk across the street. We had better trust this…
Consciousness-as-hallucination as the key to intelligence
The project of machine consciousness is to create a computational simulation with such high fidelity to the human brain and human thought (if these are even separate things) that this simulation would also construct subjective experience. In order for AI to be successful in…
Psychedelics and the useful-hallucination theory
In the same spirit as “disorders of consciousness research,” scientists are also beginning to study the neurobiology of psychedelic drugs by using these modern brain-imaging technologies. Which theory about consciousness best supports the conception that consciousness is a form…
Intelligence as an invention of each brain
What does the notion of consciousness-as-useful-hallucination imply for artificial intelligence? It requires a paradigm shift within artificial intelligence, from seeing intelligence and consciousness as being about perceiving objective truth with a “view from nowhere” in…
Logic might be the greatest hallucination
believe this logical bias might be the source of the “computational stance.” We are biased toward explaining the world with logic and computations because this is the only way that the brain can make sense of reality. Logic itself might be the greatest hallucination. Perlovsky…
Erik Davis - On Psychedelics
Psychedelics can serve as flight simulators
Like many of the death-prep meditations practised in Tibetan Buddhism and other initiatory traditions, psychedelics — provided, again, within an appropriate set and setting — can serve as flight simulators hurtling us through the shadow of death, test runs of the inevitable…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Two souls in one body
we do not see that “I” as the knower and controller am the same fellow as “myself” as something to be known and controlled. The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body—a rational soul and an animal soul, a…