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> we don't experience reality directly That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which
by tgv 5y ago
> we don't experience reality directly
That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which is somewhat mediated by low-level expectations. This takes place at sub-conscious levels. Conscious perception comes much later, and is obviously more filtered. To call it a hallucination is word play.
- pwm 5y ago> We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. Depending on how you define "reality" we only experience a tiny subset of it. We can only see/hear/touch/smell/taste a very restricted universe, only what our "antennas" can detect. In fact I would argue that we experience close to 0% of all of reality. On top of this extremely restricted input our processing of it is imperfect which means some of what we experience has nothing to do with reality.
- tgv 5y agoRestricted as it may be, we experience reality. Experiencing reality completely is impossible anyway. And in the context of hallucination, what we can't experience doesn't matter.
- pwm 5y agoSure, I don't disagree but (to me anyway) it's important to point out the difference between reality vs. our potential intake from it. The blind men and the elephant parable applies.
- ThrustVectoring 5y agoThere are fixed patterns in still images that appear to move when we perceive them. "We don't experience reality directly" and calling it a hallucination seems apt - the thing we experience when we look at things is less "what's actually there" and more "the best guess our brain can construct about what's there". Additional examples of this include the non-perception of the visual blind spot, how the brain fills in details in the middle of saccades, and how task-specific training causes perceptual differences (eg, thrown baseballs look bigger to professional batters).