Reality - It's A Hallucination

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yogi
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Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by yogi »

I've spent a lot of time thinking about reality and the mind. Old people do that. I've concluded it's all relative, but never had a good explanation of why. The linked article tells about the latest theory of such things and I am liking what I'm reading.
Philosophy and Predictive Processing is a new online research compendium in which neuroscientists, psychiatrists, philosophers-of-mind, and other big thinkers explore the theory that we're always hallucinating. Our brains aren't just processing information from your senses so we can perceive reality, the authors argue, but also constantly predicting what we'll encounter, presenting that to us as what's actually happening, and then doing error connection.
http://boingboing.net/2017/04/26/your-p ... y-may.html
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pilvikki
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Re: Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by pilvikki »

weeell, as my mind bounces from pillar to post, i've no quarrel with it being in its own solar system somewhere in a different galaxy.

the first time i became totally aware of my brain having a mind of its own was when i was about 14 and walking along the shore near where we lived. i saw something on the dock a few hundred yards away and decided it was a boy fishing... no... clearly a dog sitting there...no... just a box. this was presented to me like a slide show on a rapid setting; flick-flick-flick.

for my life i could not clearly see what i was looking at, so i walked over - but cannot remember what it actually was!

then again, i can stare at a wall and see a scene from my house; the cottage in finland with swallows flying around the birch; or the lake or.... going back even more, grandma.......... ad infinitum.

so basically i'm in total agreement and need no drugs to hallucinate.
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Kellemora
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Re: Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by Kellemora »

We had a test in college, not for grades, just for them to prove a similar point.
This was back in the days before computers, at the dawn of the TV age, hi hi, so it was done using flash cards.

Each flashcard had a drawing of an easily recognizable object, but certain lines on the drawing were made a little heavier and darker. These were big cards too, about 18 inches square, so we could see them clearly.
However, the first time they would show the card, they did so for about a second if that.

What our mind perceives we see is nothing at all like what the drawing was truly of.

After we all guessed at what we just saw, each of us getting it wrong, then they would uncover the card again for us to look at longer. A drawing of a barn we thought was a chair. The drawing of an airplane we thought was a cup, and so on and so forth.

Later on in the same class, a live person came into the room, took about fifteen seconds to look up and down the rows at each of us, then walked back out of the room.
Half an hour later we went down to the cafeteria where five men were standing against the wall side by side.
We were supposed to pick from those five, which one of them was the person who came into our classroom.
If I remember, only 4 out of 28 picked the right person.

They did this same thing again a month later, only this time the person who came into the room was only there for about five seconds instead of fifteen, however, this person acted like he was attacking the teacher, who ducked behind the desk and the man fled.
Half an hour later we went to the cafeteria, where again five men were standing against the wall.
This time, 20 of 25 of us picked the right person from the lineup.
Probably because it was a more traumatic even, and partially because we paid more attention.

But you know something, not a single one of us could say what color pants the guy was wearing.
We all got the hair and shirt right, and I got the color and type of footwear right which nobody else did, but the pants color eluded me also. They were not tan or green, sorta like a faded greenish Khaki which makes then non-descriptive or memorable.
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pilvikki
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Re: Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by pilvikki »

i would SO blow an id test! for one, i was taught to not stare at a person, just about the rudest thing you could do! secondly, yes, my mind wanders and perhaps i'd been better if told to pay attention? now i can't remember a sequence of a few numbers, n/m locan phone numbers which are grouped 07 23 45 87 14. as soon as phone numbers come up, it's deer in the headlights. :eek:

why can't we have alphanumeric numbers?

anyway. speaking of school, g/f and i were classical music fans and one day i got this idea of writing down what we pictured while listening to the pieces played. so one day the teacher put of stravinsky - and we both wrote down almost identical scenes: early morning, market day, busy town, yadda-yadda.
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yogi
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Re: Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by yogi »

It makes me wonder if that's what Igor had in mind when he composed the music. It's well known that music can affect one's mood, which in turn can affect one's perception of reality, I suppose.
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pilvikki
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Re: Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by pilvikki »

a schizophrenic web buddy from finland posted this very question a couple of days ago on fb. most of his friends are highly educated, high IQ types and after they'd posited this theory and posted that quote from,philosopher so-and-so, way over my head, i barged in with "does it really matter?"
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yogi
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Re: Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by yogi »

Lately I've been reading articles about neurosciences, perception and cognition, and artificial intelligence. There are some very highly paid and well educated people thinking about these things. The consensus is that nobody knows what exactly is the mind. They are not even sure it's located inside the brain.
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pilvikki
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Re: Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by pilvikki »

you mean the greeks or egyptians might have been right about the liver/heart thing? for me it's a bit like contemplating the cosmos: after a bit my head starts to hurt for the info just does not compute.

i'm still thinking that we're missing a dimension from out repertoire...
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yogi
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Re: Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by yogi »

The brain, the organ, is connected to all our senses. Inputs from the sensors are fed into the central processor where models of expectation are created - you know ... finger hurts, pull it out of the fire dummy. A lot of models are created for future use so that we don't have to re-analyze every human experience we encounter. It's the aggregation of all those expectations that constitute self-awareness and what we call the mind.

So, the question becomes, "is the mind just a biochemical reaction going on inside a container, or is it more than that?" Pondering that is where the headaches begin and parallel universes make sense in a quantum physics sort of way. :crazy:
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pilvikki
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Re: Reality - It's A Hallucination

Post by pilvikki »

and also, a heartache is a real thing. so if getting a "blow to the gut" when really upset and so forth.
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