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Eventually, visual scientists guessed what was happening. They weren’t our computer screens or our eyes. Was the mental calculations he performs when we see the brain. Some subconsciously concluded that the dress was in direct light and removed the image from the yellow, so they saw blue and black stripes. Others saw that it was in the shade, where the blue light predominated. Their brains removed the blue from the head to the image, and they arrived in a white and gold dress.
Thought does not only filter through reality; it builds, inferring an external world from ambiguous entrances. In Being you, Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, explains that “the inner universe of subjective experience is related to and explains the biological and physical processes that take place in the brain and body”. According to him, “experiences being you, or being me, is created in a way that the brain anticipates and controls the internal state of the body. ”
Predictions have become fashionable in recent years in academic circles. Seth and philosopher Andy Clark, a colleague from Sussex, refer to predictions made by the brain “Controlled Hallucinations.” The idea is that the brain is always building world models to explain and predict input information; these models update the predictions and the different experiences we get from our sensor inputs.
“Chairs are not red,” Seth writes, “just as they are not ugly or outdated or avant-garde … When I look at a red chair, the redness I experience depends on the properties and properties of the chair, on my brain. corresponds to the content of a set of perceptual predictions “.
Seth is not particularly interested in redness, nor in more general colors. Rather, his broader claim is that this process applies to all perceptions: “The whole experience of perception is a neural fantasy that is intertwined with the world, the best inventions of perception, making and reproducing controlled hallucinations. We could be said to be hallucinating all the time. that’s what we call reality. “
Cognitive scientists often rely on atypical examples to understand what is really going on. Seth leads the reader through an optical illusion and a fun litany of demonstrations, some quite familiar and others less so. In fact, the squares with the same shade seem to be different; the curls printed on the paper seem to rotate spontaneously; the dark figure kisses a woman on a horse; a face appears in a toilet sink. The re-creation of the psychedelic powers of the brain in silicon, created by an artificial intelligence virtual reality setup created by him and his colleagues, begs Hunter Thompson to beg for the menagerie of animal parts that come out of other objects in a plaza on the University of Sussex campus. This series of examples, which Seth recounts, is “a frightening but beneficial solution that says that consciousness is the only thing, a great, frightening mystery that seeks a great dreadful solution.” Set’s view might be disturbing for those who prefer to believe that things are as they seem: “Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is perception. ”
Seth is in pretty good solid when he describes how the brain shapes experience, which philosophers call “easy” problems of consciousness. They are easy compared to the “hard” problem: why subjective experience exists as a feature of the universe. Here he awkwardly oppresses, introducing the “real” problem, which is to “explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience”. It is not clear that the real problem differs from simple problems, but somehow he says that tackling that problem will lead us to solve a difficult problem. Now that would be a neat trick.
Seth, for the most part, relates the experiences of people who have a typical struggle with atypical stimuli. Coming to our Senses, Susan Barry, professor emeritus of neurobiology on Mount Holyobi, tells the stories of two people who acquired new senses than usual in life. Liam McCoy, who had been almost blind since he was a child, could barely see clearly when he was 15 after some surgery. Zohra Damji was completely deaf until she was given a cochlear implant when she was 12 years old. Barry explained that Damji’s surgeon “told his aunt that if he had known the length and level of Zohra’s deafness, he would not have had surgery.” Barry’s compassionate, nuanced, and observant exhibition builds on his experience:
At the age of forty-eight, I had a tremendous improvement in my vision, a change that repeatedly brought me moments of joy for the children. Crossing my eyes from the beginning of my childhood, I saw the world with one eye mostly. Then, in the middle of life, I learned to use my eyes together through a visual therapy program. With each look, everything I saw took on a new look. I saw the volume and 3D shape of the empty space between things. The branches of the tree stretched out to me; the lights floated. A visit to the supermarket products section, with all its colors and 3D shapes, can send me into a kind of ecstasy.
Barry was overjoyed with his new abilities, saying he is “seeing them in a new way.” It indicates how different it is from “seeing it for the first time”. A person who has grown up with sight can take the scene with a single glance. “But where we perceive a three-dimensional landscape full of objects and people, an adult who has just seen it sees a set of lines and pieces of color appearing in a flat plane.” As McCoy described Barry’s experience of walking up and down the stairs:
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