Tags / 79 quotes from 14 sources
#perception
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
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…
No direct link to the external world
idea that there is no direct relationship between the external world and…
Does LSD sharpen perception?
Does LSD actually enhance the accuracy of our perceptions? Do we see, think, or hear better on LSD? The question has not been scientifically investigated. In an email exchange, the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti wrote me, “I do not believe that because of drugs one is more…
Seeing TV for what it really was
Someone turned on the TV. The colors were brilliant, images seemingly jumped off the screen, and there was a fuzzy 3-D quality to the newscaster. I instantly felt I could grasp all her psychological problems, those which led her to being on TV playing the role of newscaster. I…
Distrusting reality after frequent trips
Robert and Kristian were using LSD so often during this time that they said they had a hard time trusting the non-LSD reality they experienced even when they were not on the drug. After only one trip, over the following days I too would sometimes wonder if the thoughts and…
Number sense is like color perception
Dehaene further likens our perception of math to how we perceive color. Color is not an objective property of the world that exists independently of human brains. Color does not exist in the world. Our brains create color when certain wavelengths of light hit our eyes, and they…
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…
Condemned to treat representations as the world
“Many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our constitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if…
What if the brain doesn't represent the world?
Modern neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence often implicitly assume that our senses determine the contents of our conscious experience. The assumption is that the brain is primarily reflexive and simply exists to respond to the environment. The task of AI is to…
Top-down attention and the invisible gorilla
In cognitive science Kant and Nietzsche are mostly ignored and the view of the mind as representational prevails.51 The closest we might find to Kant’s idea is sometimes referred to as top-down and bottom-up processing. Top-down processing includes our expectations, our…
How attention filters out the gorilla
we can think of it like this: our top-down attention to our task somehow focuses our eye movements on the ball only. Even though the person in the gorilla suit passes through our field of view, our brain is not looking for a gorilla. Our visual cortex and visual system do not…
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…
Vision builds a world in a fraction of a second
Hoffman says: “When we open our eyes, our visual system constructs in a fraction of a second all the shapes, depths, colors, motions, textures, and objects that we see. The computational power required for such construction is massive, but the construction is done so quickly…
Eyes only count photons
all the eye is doing is catching and counting photons. The millions of photoreceptors in our eyes only react to the number of photons they catch. Our brains then construct the colors, shapes, objects, depths, motion, or textures we see based partly on how many photons the…
Color doesn't exist outside the brain
As mentioned earlier, color is a well-known example of something that does not exist outside of our brains. There are no colors in the observer-independent physical world. The photons that hit our eyes travel in wavelengths.…
Why the apple stays red
However, an apple still looks red at the beach on a sunny day, and at your desk in your office on a rainy day. There is about a hundred times more light hitting your eye at the beach than in your office—yet the apple is still red. The redness of the apple is entirely…
The plasticity principle
even if our own private experiences are purely creations of our brains. To paraphrase the late neurobiologist (and Buddhist) Francisco Varela, we are condemned to treat the representations we experience as though they were the world. Will artificial agents that we create also…
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…
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…
Huxley's reducing valve
Human perception and consciousness often hide the true complexity of the world. Aldous Huxley, after his experiences with mescaline and LSD, saw the brain like a “reducing valve” that is actually protecting us from the vast amount of information that might otherwise flood and…
Consciousness anticipates the environment
Human consciousness then is something that the brain does, but not in response to the environment. Consciousness anticipates the environment. The environment only sets certain limits on the contents of our waking consciousness—or biases us to experience our representations in a…
Dragonflies fooled by polarized light
Donald Hoffman relates the following example about dragonflies to illustrate the idea that biological perception does not report the truth about the world: Many dragonflies, for instance, lay their eggs in water. For millions of years, their visual systems have guided them to…
A quick trick instead of the truth
more polarization the better. In the environment in which they evolved, this trick was a useful guide to behavior and allowed them to avoid constructing a complex understanding of the truth.
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…
Global neural ignition
Global neural network “ignition,” as it is sometimes called, means that neurons across your entire brain become active in response to a stimulus. This is in contrast to when a stimulus is flashed for only twenty milliseconds, for example.
The feeling of being separate from the world
This is in contrast to how we normally perceive the world; which is that the world exists outside of us and that we are separate from it.
Reality became a problem after LSD
Hofmann says: “Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into…
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Fetuses turn to the outside world in late pregnancy
So the questions for prying parents become: What do fetuses know, and when do they know it? When is your baby capable of sensing, say, taps on your belly? The developmental principle to remember is this: The brain spends the first half of pregnancy setting up its…
Perceptual asymmetry at the heart of conflict
The story of the car keys involves a change in perspective, which I like to describe as “What is obvious to you is obvious to you.” My father did not see what needed to be done to get the kids ready (and may not have wanted to help even if he did). But my mother saw very…
Perception as a handshake with expectations
The second reason content is so important is that our expectations and assumptions profoundly influence our perception of reality. This is because of the brain’s eager willingness to insert its opinion directly into what you are currently experiencing—and then fool you into…
Musical training tunes emotional hearing
There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with…
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
Eventi che si sviluppano in verticale
Pensavo che alcuni eventi hanno uno sviluppo verticale, più che orizzontale: gesto sopra gesto sopra gesto e percezione sopra percezione sopra percezione, compressi nello spazio di un istante. Per capirli e dargli un ordine dobbiamo scomporre la sovrapposizione e disporre ogni…
Gelosie che deformano la realtà
“Siete diventati come loro. Pieni di gelosie e sospetti, pronti a deformare la realtà secondo le vostre frustrazioni e paranoie.”
Functional And Physical Objects - The Big Picture
Karl popper's three worlds of knowledge
World 1: There is, first, the world that consists of physical bodies: of stones and of stars; of plants and of animals; but also of radiation, and of other forms of physical energy. I (Karl Popper) will call this physical world ‘world 1’. World 2: There is, secondly, the mental…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
The Muller-Lyer illusion
Consider the Muller-Lyer illusion. Line 1 and Line 2 are of the same length, although Line 2 appears to be longer than Line 1. Even though we have knowledge that tells us the two lines are of equal length, our perception of the two arrows is not privy to this information. Our…
Perception works independently of knowledge
“module” must be working independently of this knowledge.
Shakey and the sense-model-plan-act cycle
Shakey’s design mirrors the traditional view that an agent should be decomposed into four functional components. This model revolves around the sense-model-plan-act cycle. First, the agent senses the world. Then a model of the world is constructed on the basis of the sensory…
Breaking the circle of meaningless symbols
How can symbols ever be grounded by anything but other meaningless symbols? Part of the problem of ascribing meaning to a symbol requires that the circle of meaninglessness be broken. Harnard imagines a classical symbolic system sitting on top of a sub-symbolic connectionist…
The frog and the fly
Maturana and Varela illustrate this point by first presenting a juicy fly to the top-left area of the frog’s field of view.
Rotating the frog's eye
Next, they sever part of the frog’s eye, such that the whole eye can be rotated by 180 degrees.
A frog's eye is not a camera
Importantly, the frog will persist with this behaviour. It will never adapt its behaviour in light of the unsuccessful attempts to capture the fly. The moral of the story is that a frog’s eye does not act as a camera supplying information to the frog’s planning module, which…
The retina catches the fly on its own
as Maturana and Varela went on to show, the fly-catching behaviour is solved by the retina itself, independent of the processes going on in the rest of the frog’s brain. This experiment illustrates how certain behaviours, such as foraging for food, are realized through a tight…
Behaviors in parallel, with no central control
Behaviours are built on, to yield more complex behaviours. Unlike much of conventional robotics, which takes the sense-model-plan-act cycle as a starting point, Brooks’ robots contain pieces of machinery that are autonomous and operate in parallel. There is no central control…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Ricco è chi estrae bellezza da tutto
È DAVVERO RICCO SOLO CHI SA ESTRARRE LA RICCHEZZA E LA BELLEZZA ◊◊◊◊◊◊ DA QUALSIASI COSA" (Orison Swett Marden)
Leielui (italian Edition) (de Carlo, Andrea)
Il ritratto che dipingiamo noi
Lui guarda via; dice “Spesso quando trovi qualcosa pensi che sia perché l’avevi cercata”. “E non è così?” dice lei. Vorrebbe saperlo; le servirebbe. Lui sorride amaro. “È quasi sempre un collegamento illusorio” dice. “O una verità transitoria.” Lei dice “Nel senso che…
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
At the moment of experiencing we cannot tell a perception from an hallucination
It is constitutive for Maturana that at the moment of experiencing we cannot tell a perception from an hallucination. From his analysis, the science of neurophysiology has failed to generate a mechanism which could explain our hearing/seeing objects external to us, independent…
Constitutive ontologies = second path
In following the second path the observer assumes, quite differently, that the starting point must be the constitutive biological phenomena of being unable to distinguish perception from illusion in daily living. In the absence of being able to make statements about…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Bodies known only by inference from ideas
Bodies, on the other hand, cannot be known directly but only indirectly by inferring their existence and features from the contents of the mind. I do not directly perceive the table in front of me; but, strictly speaking, I perceive only my conscious experience of the table, my…
We perceive only the contents of our minds
It is important to understand that on Descartes’ view we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. What we directly perceive, that is, perceive without any inferential processes, are the contents of our own minds. So if I hold up my hand in front of…
The representative theory of perception
How do I know that the representation really represents, or represents accurately? Descartes’ view was common in the seventeenth century. It is called the “representative theory of perception,”
The greatest single disaster in the history of philosophy
Descartes presents very little by way of an argument to show that we cannot directly perceive tables, chairs, mountains, etc. but can only perceive our ideas of these things. He makes the transition from perceiving real objects to perceiving only the contents of our own minds…
God is not a deceiver
assuming that God exists, he argues that God cannot be a deceiver. Because of God’s perfection, it would be inconsistent to suppose that he could be a deceiver, for deceit is an imperfection. But if God is not a deceiver, then there must exist an external world, and I must have…
Causal relations are all there is to a belief
Beliefs, for example, are caused by perceptions and together with desires they cause actions. Such causal relations are all that there is to having a belief.
Mary has never seen red
A similar argument was advanced by the Australian philosopher, Frank Jackson.2 Jackson imagines a neuro-biologist, Mary, who knows all there is to know about color perception. She has a total and complete knowledge of the neurophysiology of our color-perceiving apparatus, and…
The gestalt structure of consciousness
Our conscious experiences do not just come to us as a disorganized mess; rather they typically come to us with well-defined, and sometimes even precise, structures. We do not, for example, in normal vision see undifferentiated blurs and fragments; rather, we see tables, chairs…
Memories that refer to their own causes
The most biologically basic intentional phenomena, including perceptual experiences, intentions to do something, and memories, have a peculiar logical feature in their conditions of satisfaction. It is part of the conditions of satisfaction of, for example, my memory that I…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
The lens shapes how we see the world
As I researched and prepared these presentations, I became particularly interested in how perceptions are formed, how they govern the way we see, and how the way we see governs how we behave. This led me to a study of expectancy theory and self-fulfilling prophecies or the…
Helping our son without really believing in him
we began to realize that what we were doing to help our son was not in harmony with the way we really saw him.
We assume things are as we see them
We seldom question their accuracy; we’re usually even unaware that we have them. We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of those assumptions. The way we see things is the source…
Two people can disagree and both be right
first encountered this exercise many years ago at the Harvard Business School. The instructor was using it to demonstrate clearly and eloquently that two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It’s not logical; its psychological.
We see the world as we are
Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Mind at Large and the reducing valve
Earlier in his essay he had referred to possibilities broached by the English philosopher C. D. Broad. The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has…
Four levels of the psychedelic experience
Masters and Houston start by asking the basic question facing anyone who becomes involved with LSD—how can individual trips differ so wildly from one person to the next?—and drawing on several years of research, they speak of “four levels of the drug experience hypothesized as…
LSD and the right hemisphere
For centuries, Western industrial society has overplayed the importance of the left hemisphere, referring to it as the major hemisphere, while systematically downgrading the right and calling it the minor hemisphere. The idea I was pushing around in my journal was that LSD…
The apartment looked wrong
The apartment looked wrong. Normally I loved its raffishness, but now both apartment and its contents looked seedy to the point of being sinister. Gazing around I thought, Christ, what a dump! How has my life come to this? Which wasn’t without a certain humor, since I was…
LSD's power to terrify
The next morning I sat staring blankly at the trip journal. What on Earth had happened? Was that Grof’s “transpersonal realm”? If so, describing it as “multilayered and multidimensional” was putting it mildly. How did such an amalgam of diverse elements—astoundingly…
Becoming the daffodil
I was horrified to see tiny bugs crawling up the flower’s stem. I looked more closely. They were not bugs, but very small droplets of moisture moving by capillary action up the inside of the stem. I realized with shock that I could only be seeing this because I had X-ray…
Toddlers radiating silver light
I found myself—literally, as though I had just woken up—in the middle of Hampstead Village. I was standing in front of Christchurch, and in the forecourt of the church was a nursery school. The children were little more than toddlers, mostly two or three years old. They were…
Seeing sight itself
Whenever I had approached such intensity before there’d been a whirring, then cracking sound in my head; this time, however, it wasn’t sound but sight that started to disintegrate. Vision went pointillist. It began to break down into pixels. The world started to go grainy…
I am everything I behold
“People may sense internal organs and physiological processes usually kept out of consciousness.” That was exactly what had just happened to me when I felt I was seeing the internal structure of the eye. Then I began to wonder whether the same mechanism couldn’t have been…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Hume never catches himself without a perception
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, colour or sound, etc. I never catch myself, distinct from some such perception. David…
The homunculus and the infinite regress
it is tempting to think that light shines on the retina and then the brain creates from this a single, three-dimensional image. But who sees this image? The temptation is to think (or perhaps more usually assume) that there is a kind of mind’s eye which inspects the image in…
Exoticising the unfamiliar
However, there is clearly a danger here of exoticising the unfamiliar.
The systematic elusiveness of I
We do not observe the self in the same way that we observe the yellowness of a tulip, the smell of coffee or the thought that I really must book my train. The self is what is having those thoughts and perceptions – it is not itself a perception. And when you introspect, you…
The five aggregates
Strip that away and you are left, in Buddhism, with the ‘five aggregates’: body, feelings, perception, mental formations and consciousness. The self, as Batchelor puts it, ‘is neither reducible to them nor can it be understood as existing independently of them.’ No more than…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Conservation of number and the spread-out coins
Because preoperational children tend to believe what they see, they do not yet have a firm grasp of qualities belonging to the objects in their world. For example, they confuse “heavy” with “large.” Due to inexperience, most young children would initially be surprised that a…
Villa Metaphora (Andrea De Carlo)
Il gioco delle deduzioni sugli sconosciuti
“Chi credi che siano, i tedeschi?” Di nuovo fa uno sforzo per uscire dallo stato di semi-abbandono in cui stava scivolando, riattivare almeno in parte la sua presenza. “Non lo so.” Tiziana scuote la testa, inspira i vapori solforosi della superficie. Questo è uno dei loro…