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What makes you believe that your conscious perceptions have any specific (let alone regularizeable) kind of relationship to reality at all? In all likelihood, c

What makes you believe that your conscious perceptions have any specific (let alone regularizeable) kind of relationship to reality at all? In all likelihood, conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution, emphasizing those aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out those we can safely ignore. https://www.nature.com/articles/544296a?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1704_FHBOOKSARTSPERCEPTION_PORTFOLIO&foxtrotcallback=true https://www.nature.com/articles/544296a?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1704...

pygy_ 7y ago
I think that my consciousness (that perpetual “now” we’re trapped in) happens in my brain based on information about the past state of the world. I know it isn’t a perfect rendition (see illusions, hallucinations, cognitive biases and other brain farts). I totally go by Anais Nin’s “We don’t see the word as it is, we see the world as we are”. I know it has anything to do with the rest of the world through the impact of my actions.
acqq 7y ago
> conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution, emphasizing those aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out those we can safely ignore. It's also known that it's often enough evolutionary advantageous having the model of the surroundings which is more accurate than that of your competition (There's some paper I've read about that, I just don't have the time to find it now. Maybe somebody has some more ready). Therefore the successful products of evolution correctly reflect "outside world" in their models, and even have the "safety mechanisms" and "error correction" facilities (based on the feedback, of course). There are even experiments with people: if you'd get the glasses that invert the picture you see, you'd for a while see the world top down, but if you wear them long enough, the internal adjustment of the model would happen and you'd see again up as up, even if the "signal" is provably reversed compared to what you received for your whole life. On the opposite side (that the "accurate enough" is not "always correct") we also already know the examples where the "accuracy" breaks in humans: that's the cause of people ascribing to the agency of gods the phenomena with purely natural causes. There wasn't evolutionary need for an intrinsic development of more accurate model of these phenomena (e.g. what makes the Sun move across the sky or what the stars are). The scientific method, luckily, allowed humans as a group to overcome these limitations, e.g. Aristarchus, some 2200 years ago, that is, at least 200 years BCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Aristarchus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Ar... (note, at that time the term "science" still didn't exist).
- pygy_ 7y ago
  Re. Flipping images I actually experienced it first hand. I live in continental Europe where cars are driven on the right side of the road. A few years ago, I spent a week in southwest England, with my car. Upon arrival, driving on the left and passing on the right felt weird, but after a few minutes of practice on the highway, I was starting to get good driving sensations... then the weirdest thing happened: for a brief moment, I experienced the text on road signs and license plates as mirrored. My brain had gone overboard and flipped the whole scene :-). Then It quickly subsided and I went on to discover the fair weather of Cornwall.

pygy_ 7y ago

I think that my consciousness (that perpetual “now” we’re trapped in) happens in my brain based on information about the past state of the world. I know it isn’t a perfect rendition (see illusions, hallucinations, cognitive biases and other brain farts). I totally go by Anais Nin’s “We don’t see the word as it is, we see the world as we are”. I know it has anything to do with the rest of the world through the impact of my actions.

acqq 7y ago

> conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution, emphasizing those aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out those we can safely ignore. It's also known that it's often enough evolutionary advantageous having the model of the surroundings which is more accurate than that of your competition (There's some paper I've read about that, I just don't have the time to find it now. Maybe somebody has some more ready). Therefore the successful products of evolution correctly reflect "outside world" in their models, and even have the "safety mechanisms" and "error correction" facilities (based on the feedback, of course). There are even experiments with people: if you'd get the glasses that invert the picture you see, you'd for a while see the world top down, but if you wear them long enough, the internal adjustment of the model would happen and you'd see again up as up, even if the "signal" is provably reversed compared to what you received for your whole life. On the opposite side (that the "accurate enough" is not "always correct") we also already know the examples where the "accuracy" breaks in humans: that's the cause of people ascribing to the agency of gods the phenomena with purely natural causes. There wasn't evolutionary need for an intrinsic development of more accurate model of these phenomena (e.g. what makes the Sun move across the sky or what the stars are). The scientific method, luckily, allowed humans as a group to overcome these limitations, e.g. Aristarchus, some 2200 years ago, that is, at least 200 years BCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Aristarchus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Ar... (note, at that time the term "science" still didn't exist).

pygy_ 7y ago
Re. Flipping images I actually experienced it first hand. I live in continental Europe where cars are driven on the right side of the road. A few years ago, I spent a week in southwest England, with my car. Upon arrival, driving on the left and passing on the right felt weird, but after a few minutes of practice on the highway, I was starting to get good driving sensations... then the weirdest thing happened: for a brief moment, I experienced the text on road signs and license plates as mirrored. My brain had gone overboard and flipped the whole scene :-). Then It quickly subsided and I went on to discover the fair weather of Cornwall.