Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Seth

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Spectrum
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Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Seth

Post by Spectrum »

Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen?

According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality."

Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.
Does any one has a counter argument to the above hypothesis?
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

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I would call the work of the brain which maps the environment as reported by the senses and creates an internal model of it "interpretation", and not "hallucination". But hey, each to his own words.

That's A. B. is that our senses presumably give a "true to reality" signal to our brains. When a sensor sends the message to the brain "this object your hand touched is hot" is so because the object is hot. There is not much or there is no freedom of variation in the sensation and the sensory message. So the hallucination is determined, not altered or influenced by noise. Therefore hallucination may not be the best word to express the work the brain does on processing sensory information.
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Woodart
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by Woodart »

Powerful speaker and thinker. I hope he is right about AI - I really don't want it to succeed - I think it is playing with fire - we shall see. I would call him a type of phenomenologist and existentialist. I largely agree with him. I always like the quote of "Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." - Lily Tomlin
Prothero
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by Prothero »

There is a reason why we distinguish "hallucinations" and "dreams" from "reality" but apparently the difference can be lost on some.
Spectrum
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by Spectrum »

-1- wrote:I would call the work of the brain which maps the environment as reported by the senses and creates an internal model of it "interpretation", and not "hallucination". But hey, each to his own words.
There is a very complicated process [say process X] that gives us a range of perceptions depending on the circumstances they are triggered, i.e.
  • 1. imaginations - by conscious thinking/imagine it
    2. dreams - triggered during dreams
    3. consciously perceiving an apple on table.
    4. Others types of perceptions
Note perceptions 1-4 share the same process X.
Within 4-Others there is a type of perception called hallucinations.

The logic:
  • All perceptions are generated by process X
    Process X generated hallucinations
    Therefore all perceptions are hallucinations.
What the above implies is imagination are generated by process X which also generate hallucinations. therefore imagination is hallucination but this is a form of controlled hallucination. Normal dreams are also hallucinations but they are not controlled. hallucinations. Conscious perceptions is also a form of hallucinations but albeit a controlled one.
Thus we can say hallucinations via mental illness, drugs, etc. are uncontrolled hallucinations or perceptions.

This agree with Anil Seth proposition;
"we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it 'reality.' "

The above is seemingly rhetorical, but bringing perceptions [of reality, dreams, from sickness, induced. etc.] into a common denominator in terms of the degree of controlled or uncontrolled hallucinations is significant to understand how the brain works in all these occurrences.

This is critical in philosophy for the philosophical-anti-realist position and also for the non-theistic philosophies which is supposed more realistic and rational.

That's A. B. is that our senses presumably give a "true to reality" signal to our brains. When a sensor sends the message to the brain "this object your hand touched is hot" is so because the object is hot. There is not much or there is no freedom of variation in the sensation and the sensory message. So the hallucination is determined, not altered or influenced by noise. Therefore hallucination may not be the best word to express the work the brain does on processing sensory information.
It is true we normally do not equate hallucinations with perception of normal reality because hallucination normally is invoked in relation to some mental illness.

As I had mentioned above, all types of perceptions [1-4 above] are generated by a preliminary process X.
Grey is not black, but it is not wrong to interpret grey [Black + White] as 1 to 50% blackness.
So it is not wrong to interpret all perceptions in terms of degree and type of hallucination [so long as we qualify it properly] with the intentions to generate positive results from it.

If normal reality is ordered, controlled and shared hallucinations, then it cannot be stretched to be absolute reality that exists independently because fundamentally at its roots it is a type of hallucination.

-- Updated Fri Jul 28, 2017 10:12 pm to add the following --
Woodart wrote:Powerful speaker and thinker. I hope he is right about AI - I really don't want it to succeed - I think it is playing with fire - we shall see. I would call him a type of phenomenologist and existentialist. I largely agree with him. I always like the quote of "Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." - Lily Tomlin
I agree with him on AI and machines [man made] cannot replicate human consciousness. This by nature is a non-starter and an impossibility.

However the greater possibility could be a real 'Planet of the Apes' if a group of scientists could expedite an exponential increase in the self-awareness and intelligence of already existing Chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans and other primates, or at the extremes to mosquitoes or bacteria.
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Burning ghost
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by Burning ghost »

Not a very good video. Old news. VERY old news.

He uses the term "hallucination" to get appoint across. He is of course not saying EVERYTHING is a hallucination because that would destroy the meaning.
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by JamesOfSeattle »

Actually, I have several problems with Seth's use of language.

First he is just re-defining hallucination, as others above have noted.

Second, he defines hallucination as uncontrolled perception. I don't see how perception is either controlled or uncontrolled. What does controlled perception mean? Hallucination is simply perception which is unrelated to reality.

Third, he separates the world from the self as somehow significant. I would claim (somewhat controversially) that relative to the agents responsible for conscious events, the world and most of the body, including the neocortex, are the environment. And yes, this is a kind of homuncular theory, but there isn't just one homunculus, there are several. Damasio refers to them as separate selves, and Minsky referred to them as the society of mind.

*
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by LuckyR »

Obviously there is truth in the idea that what we think of as reality is a mental projection of the same and that there are errors in for collection of perception data and in the processing and interpretation of it. However it is a convenient misuse of the term hallucination to describe the known error rate of our understanding of reality with that word.
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Spectrum
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by Spectrum »

JamesOfSeattle wrote:Actually, I have several problems with Seth's use of language.

First he is just re-defining hallucination, as others above have noted.

Second, he defines hallucination as uncontrolled perception. I don't see how perception is either controlled or uncontrolled. What does controlled perception mean? Hallucination is simply perception which is unrelated to reality.
Seth is not wrong as he is merely shifting the perspective.
It is like saying diamonds are nothing other than it is pure carbon [C] like pencil leads and that is true in one perspective from the atomic level and disregarding the way the atoms are structure.

I could say diamonds are controlled carbons atoms.
This is true in a way where we take pure carbon, i.e. graphite and put them under high temperatures and pressures in a controlled manner and what we can get are artificial diamonds.

'Perceptions' are a resultant of many semi modular neural programs in the brain coming together and combining in various ways. Memories are an independent modular function. Images of obtains from the various senses are stored in different parts of the brain. Motions, time, space are handled by different parts and modular functions of the brain.
Note the video by Oliver Sacks below;

Thus if one were to imaging the image of an apple, the brain will have to access various databases and programs and process them as an image of an apple to be perceived in the mind. In this sense there is control and to ensure the proper image of an apple is brought to the conscious mind rather than an orange or a car when one is thinking of an apple. Thus a normal perception is a 'controlled' perception because it is within the full normal process and the conscious will of the person.

In the case of a hallucination, the perception [of say an apple] process is abnormal and appear without any conscious effort or expectation of the person. Suddenly a hallucinator sees a 'real' apple on a table in front of him/her. Because the preliminary process is the same in any perception, a hallucination is thus an uncontrolled perception.

Watch this very interesting video where Oliver Sacks explained the neural mechanics of hallucinations.
Ramanchandran wrote:In other words, these back projections allow you to play a sort of
―twenty questions‖ game with the image, enabling you to rapidly home in on the correct
answer.
It‘s as if each of us is hallucinating all the time and what we call perception involves merely selecting the one hallucination that best matches the current input. This is an overstatement, of course, but it has a large grain of truth.
'The Tell-Tale Brain, pg 55 - Ramachandran]
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by Larrylarry »

I can see where this can be true. In my journey I have found that things that I really want to happen usually happen eventually over time. It could take a long time or it could be instant. I feel like this is because we halucinate our reality. It would make perfect sense
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by Prothero »

For an absolute Idealist (where the entire world is a mental construct), a hallucination might be an individual construct, whereas what we call "reality" would be a group or universal construct, but in terms of their ontology, they would be equal.
Most of us however (in practice, even if not in theory) are realists and distinguish between mental constructs which are the product of interaction and relationship with the "exterior, real" world and those mental constructs which are produced only by the mind and do not represent the exterior world (hallucinations and for that matter dreams).
I have no desire to argue with profound skeptics or absolute idealists, as such debates are not likely to be productive.
If one wants to discuss direct or naïve realism, vs indirect or representational realism, that is sometimes illuminating regarding the process of perception.
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Re: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Se

Post by Spectrum »

Prothero wrote:For an absolute Idealist (where the entire world is a mental construct), a hallucination might be an individual construct, whereas what we call "reality" would be a group or universal construct, but in terms of their ontology, they would be equal.
Most of us however (in practice, even if not in theory) are realists and distinguish between mental constructs which are the product of interaction and relationship with the "exterior, real" world and those mental constructs which are produced only by the mind and do not represent the exterior world (hallucinations and for that matter dreams).
There are more philosophical room to explore than what you have presented above.

As far as the empirical is concern I am a realist. As for the transcendental, I am a transcendental idealist.

Actually those who differentiate their mental constructs from the "exterior real" world all the way are actually the absolute idealists [say they are 'externalists'].
The externalists [philosophical realists] can only indulge in what is in their mind [perception of reality] as the nearest to reality and the "real reality" as external to their mind cannot be perceived because there is a perception gap.
The externalists acknowledge there is no way they can ever experience the 'real' reality but can only correspond to its truth.
The externalists are thus epistemologically living in an illusory world [of externalism] and do not understand what is 'real' reality.

As an empirical realist and transcendental idealist I indulge in the real reality, both epistemologically and realistically.
I have no desire to argue with profound skeptics or absolute idealists, as such debates are not likely to be productive.
This is very relative.
Once upon a time, the majority of flat-earthers accused the non-believers as skeptics and other pejorative labels.
'Skeptics' are ones who do not agree with one's favored beliefs, but such accusations do not indicate their beliefs are true. Example theists accuse non-theists as skeptics.

To have a greater understanding of reality, one way to go is to strive for a greater understanding of the subject [currently very lacking] in addition knowing the external world [well covered Science at present].

Note this problem of empirical realism;
1. Seeing a 3D face of Einstein when the real empirical reality is a convex hollow shape in the mask is a degree of hallucination [say 50%].

2. I say, the process of seeing a 'real' apple on a table where one can feel its solidness and taste it when eaten is processed by the same basic processes as in 1 above with some other added processes. This is a hallucination of say 10% relative to 1.

So, your brain hallucinates your conscious reality, albeit in various degrees.
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