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Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? (2015) [video]

45 points by akkartik 4y ago

yamrzou 4y ago
He distinguishes between perception and reality, but at no point he defines reality. How could he know that a given perception is different from reality, when perception is already one of the ways of knowing reality (along with: Other senses, cognition, human consensus) ?
- reilly3000 4y ago
  Objective reality is a disturbingly difficult thing to prove.
  - telmo 4y ago
    It is impossible to prove, because "objective reality" refers to a hypothetical reality that exists independently of the perceptions of conscious entities. The problem, of course, is that we are conscious entities and all of our experience of reality comes from our perceptions, and there is no conceivable way for us to experience reality if not through our perceptions. This is a very simple and even tautological conclusion, that a lot of smart people I know seem to have a hard time accepting. I think that this is because people assume that science assumes materialism, which it doesn't, of course. Science requires no metaphysical commitment.
    - implements 4y ago
      > Science requires no metaphysical commitment. https://iep.utm.edu/met-scie/ https://iep.utm.edu/met-scie/ or https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/48844/axioms-in-science-and-the-scientific-method https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/48844/axioms-... You can’t really do science without having certain metaphysical beliefs about the uniform nature of causality across time and space, for example.
      - rjbwork 4y ago
        Not necessarily uniform across all time and space, but certainly in the roughly observable universe. Definitely in our local solar system.
      - axilmar 4y ago
        > about the uniform nature of causality across time and space, for example. Nothing can exist without causality as we know it, i.e. a thing happens which is the cause of another thing that happens. That does not mean the order of events is as perceived, or that there is even an order of events. The order of events is the way observers perceive the events, and is independent of the cause and effect. For example, everything that happens in the universe may already have happened, at the instance the universe was born. But we, as members of the universe, perceive it as happening one thing at a time, like watching a movie already created.
        n4r9 4y ago
        Causality is part of the framework that we might impose on our experience in order to make sense of it. It cannot be proved to be any more objective than our experience of sounds or colours. David Hume spoke a lot about this: https://iep.utm.edu/hume-causation/ https://iep.utm.edu/hume-causation/
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        > Nothing can exist without causality as we know it, i.e. a thing happens which is the cause of another thing that happens. Not only is this not true of all conceivable worlds, it's not even true for the most commonly accepted explanation of physics. In the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the value that will be observed in an experiment has no cause - it is random in some range. For example, if we detect an electron passing through the left slit of a double slit apparatus, there is no cause for why it passed through the left slit and not the right one (in the CI of QM).
        n4r9 4y ago
        I guess CI admits a weaker form of causality, in which an effect produced according to a determined probability distribution. But even this is part of the map rather than the territory.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      > It is impossible to prove, because "objective reality" refers to a hypothetical reality that exists independently of the perceptions of conscious entities. The problem, of course, is that we are conscious entities and all of our experience of reality comes from our perceptions, and there is no conceivable way for us to experience reality if not through our perceptions. Are our perceptions and experiences of reality not also a part of reality? If not, then what are they a part of? > This is a very simple and even tautological conclusion... This itself is an experience of reality, an objectively incorrect one if you ask me. > I think that this is because people assume that science assumes materialism, which it doesn't, of course. Science, having no volition, does not assume anything. Scientists on the other hand, whom I've spoken to hundreds of, very often do assume materialism. I personally believe that humans are unable to not assume most things, and as evidence I would present the content of all internet forums.
- callesgg 4y ago
  Donald seams to believe that “reality” is defined in the terms of something like... reality: “the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.” That definition allows him to make the argument that he makes; as the definition separates our ideas from the thing that reality is. It’s a definition with problems…
  - passion__desire 4y ago
    Map vs Territory
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  this video needs no more than the caption: > John Carpenter's Dark Star - 1974 from phenomenology to cartesian skepticism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck bonus relevance for AI hubbub
  - waseems 4y ago
    Thank you, this made my day :)
- nine_k 4y ago
  I'd say that there's a reality (whatever it is; some phenomena that can be observed in whatever ways), and there are models of it. Unless the reality has very particular properties (some kind of regularity / redundancy), every model of it is a simplification, so it has discrepancies. Even if the reality is regular and compressible perfectly into a model, it's rather hard to come up with such a model, and to prove it's the right one.
- nix23 4y ago
  It's the old "Is a falling tree creates a sound if no one hears it". The simple answer is NO, because there is no "compatible ear" that interprets those "sound"-waves, as sound. The reality is, it always creates waves but not sound.
  - yamrzou 4y ago
    The better answer is to agree on how 'sound' should be defined, which would dissolve the question. “Do you think that 'sound' should be defined to require both acoustic vibrations (pressure waves in air) and also auditory experiences (someone to listen to the sound), or should 'sound' be defined as meaning only acoustic vibrations, or only auditory experience?” From: Disputing Definitions — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-definitions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...
    - nix23 4y ago
      >The better answer is to agree on how 'sound' should be defined, which would dissolve the question. No it's not because now you just define what sound is for humans. Pressure waves in the right frequency is interpreted as sound for humans. Same with colors, for most humans red is red. Frequencies are the reality, but sound/color is just a interpretation.
      - stagas 4y ago
        It's the other way around. Frequency is an abstraction. Sound/color is the reality.
        nix23 4y ago
        >Sound/color is the reality. Have you ever had an argument with a bee if that flower is red? Or a blue-wale how Mozart sounds for him? Are waves on a body of water an abstraction? But your obviously a troll so i stop here.
        4y ago
- yarg 4y ago
  Hold your hand up and look at it, now (without moving your hand) look at the wall (or whatever else) beyond it. You'll perceive your hand in two different places - when it obviously isn't, because what you're perceiving is not reality, but the hack that allowed your ancestors to survive it.
dang 4y ago
Discussed at the time (barely): Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9782664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9782664 - June 2015 (1 comment)
pffft8888 4y ago
Interviews from the 70s with David Bohm about his cooncepts/theory of implicate and explicate order is much deeper and more sound than any TED talk about reality vs perception.
trabant00 4y ago
For me it's a simple problem of information size. A complete model of reality, aka the universe, takes this many bits. Our brains or computers have that many bits, obviously many, many orders of magnitude less. So any model we can actually make is an extremely lossy compression that will have horrible artifacts and distortions. But I also find this a truism, and quite a useless one. Of what help is pointing this out?
- stagas 4y ago
  The universe and the brain are just assumptions, you're already in the realm of imagination when you talk about them as they can't be empirically known. You only know what you experience right now, that could be the entirety of it. When you move from a place to another, you simply just imagine that new place. You join those thoughts coherently because you like to think logically, but otherwise nothing necessarily exists outside of perception.
  - dalmo3 4y ago
    > nothing necessarily exists outside of perception Random thought: if a stray bullet hit you on the back of your head and you die, does perception end? And if so what caused that bullet?
    - stagas 4y ago
      I don't remember perception starting and so far i have no indication that it ends, so it's all assumptions here because "perception end" is something i cannot know, empirically.
  - trabant00 4y ago
    While I agree I think my question still stands. Of what help is this? I can only talk to you about what I perceive in words and concepts that make sense to me, as flawed as they might be. Even if I would only imagine the existence of computers, forums and you, what can I do about it? How is this knowledge actionable?
panda-giddiness 4y ago
Consider that of the four fundamental forces, we can only directly probe two: gravity (via the inner ear) and electromagnetism (all other sensory organs).
- jamesrom 4y ago
  What do you mean by directly? Gravity is only sensed via an interaction between fluids and fine hairs in your inner ear. By that definition, we can also detect the weak interaction by feeling the sun on our face or the warmth of radioactive material.
  - panda-giddiness 4y ago
    On the contrary, I'd be perfectly content classifying our probing of gravity/acceleration indirect, too. For completeness I include gravity because it's the only other fundamental interaction we arguably directly sense (inner ear fluid and fine hairs are part of the same sensory organ, unlike our skin and the sun). But I still suspect we would be able to sense gravity without inner ear fluid, even if only slightly. When we vigorously shake our head, the fluid flows against the hairs, so naturally the electromagnetic force and/or Pauli exclusion is mostly responsible for sensing. However, even absent any inner ear fluid, the hairs should still bend due to gravity -- I just don't know how appreciable the effect is.
    - jamesrom 4y ago
      > For completeness I include gravity because it's the only other fundamental interaction we arguably directly sense (inner ear fluid and fine hairs are part of the same sensory organ, unlike our skin and the sun). Not sure why the organ doing the sensing matters. I'm talking about thermoreceptors in the skin, obviously. But just to be clear, I'm saying that you're actually sensing electromagnetic force in your inner ear _caused by_ gravity. Not gravity itself. Even if the hairs bend due to gravity alone, that force upon the sensory receptors is an electromagnetic one. But if you consider that 'direct' then you must also consider sensing of the weak force, as 'direct'. Whether it be via thermoreceptors or your retina. tldr gravity : bending hairs :: weak interaction : radium glow
stagas 4y ago
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”. Reality is perception. It is one set of logical possibities that allow the thinking agent to exist and to produce the thoughts it is producing right now. It is the output of a pure function in which it creates itself and maintains its existence, constantly feeding its output to its input. Dreams are the exploration step of that function. Once in a while, the function creates a sandbox, feeds it with output gathered and classified as semi-coherent (adding in a few random bits), it simulates outcomes and picks out those fragments that didn't crash it. Those are then integrated back into its main code, into the world it imagines it inhabits, "reality".
- quietcomments 4y ago
  You can't have a perception without an external thing existing. If you're born tabula rasa and everything you know is learnt, then everything your senses know came from an external object which exists independently of your senses. Are we going to do Kant vs Nietschze until the end of time?
  - puffoflogic 4y ago
    As long as Kant's would-be defenders defend counterfactual positions only, then I suppose there's no reason the debate would ever end. > If you're born tabula rasa There's lots of evidence that just isn't so. If nothing else, we appear to be equipped with minds which are better suited than random chance to build a "meaningful" model of the world around us.
  - stagas 4y ago
    Ok but that's a hypothesis you make. To me it is absurd how an external object can exist independently of perception. What does it even mean that anything "exists" without senses to perceive it?
    - quietcomments 4y ago
      What are you perceiving if it doesn't really exist out there somewhere? The solar system existed before our senses received the information that it did. Insurance companies scan for pre-existing medical conditions before they discover them in new patients. Why would you seek new objects, if there were not objects out there to find? You have to sever all relationships to un-sensed, but knowable objects, to live only in the senses. That kind of reduction is too much to ask.
mhandley 4y ago
The problem with this talk is that it's almost content free. He has demonstrated that sometimes we (and other animals) misperceive things, or construct in our heads what we expect to see. He has demonstrated via simple virtual world models that simple artificial organisms evolve to perceive things that keep us alive and ignore other things. But what he has failed to do is tell us anything at all about how our perceptions generally differ from reality. Yes, the map is not the territory - we know that. Yes, we can't directly see atoms, we know that too, though we can with our machines. But other than being a low definition representation, he has not shown any important way in which the map differs from a low definition representation of reality, except that sometimes we make mistakes. He could be right, spacetime could just be the API, but he has presented no evidence for that.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Well we do see atoms, and we see them directly -- in the sense that atoms are a direct cause of our perceptions. However what "seeing atoms" means at a "given resolution" differs. There's a long history of this paranoid game: we think the stick is bent! We were wrong! We didnt see the stick at all ! (false). Ah, but damn: how is it now we know we were wrong? How is it now that, when we took the stick out of the water, we know it isnt bent? Every sceptical example ever posed has this feature: it presumes that it is possible to be right. That is quite daming to the whole project of scepticism; it is, essentially, incoherent. Without the possibility of knowing the stick is bent, our mistake was never even a mistake. The very worry of being mistaken is a worry which presumes that truth & knowledege are the ordinary background of our experience.
  - foolrush 4y ago
    > in the sense that atoms are a direct cause of our perceptions. I do not believe this is correct in any manner, and reduces the role of cognition. Jastrow’s work focuses on this departure between one context and higher order cognition.
    - mjburgess 4y ago
danbruc 4y ago
There is certainly truth to the claim that the brain abstracts over the raw sensory input. Reading, for example, would be a much more intractable problem if you had to do it in terms of photons hitting your retina instead of first abstracting the patterns on your retina into shapes, letters and words. But the leap from there is some abstraction going on to reality is nothing like the abstraction seems not [well] justified to me. And we can check it, we can build all kind of sensors and machines that interact with the world out there, cut out consciousness in the process, and see if the sensors report a world very different from how we perceive it. And they don't. There is of course a complication to this, constructing those sensors and machines and looking at what they are doing always has to pass through our perception, so maybe we accidentally build sensors that yield the same distorted version of reality as our brain does or the sensors are actually reporting a very different world but when we look at the sensor readings they get distorted to match the perception through our senses. But given all the ways and angles from which we can measure things and then transform and represent the results before perceiving them, I have a hard time imagining how it could always be coherently distorted to match our normal perception without showing any inconsistencies. And our perception and intuition is of course not perfect. Time and space, for example, are different from what our perception and experience tells us, but we managed to measure it and uncover the differences. But even in this case our perception and intuition are not really wrong, they are a very good approximation for everyday situations and only shows noticeable discrepancies in extreme circumstances.
arunix 4y ago
Related book on the same topic: https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019/12/24/book-review-the-case-against-reality-how-evolution-hid-the-truth-from-our-eyes/ https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019/12/24/book-review-the-...
strogonoff 4y ago
There’s also a paper, well worth a read: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0057...
- csmeyer 4y ago
  Scroll down to the section on Conscious Realism. This presents a mathematical basis for what "base reality" is: a graph of conscious agents, and our reality is merely a projection of that graph (we perceive elements of the projection, not the base graph). This to me is a much more powerful idea than the Ted talk which is a bit clickbaity.
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    Yes. This reverses the popular physicalist understanding of causality from “neurons firing cause your mind” to “measurable changes in the brain are reflections of conscious activity”, and so on. This idealistic monism makes the most sense at a fundamental level. Since our mind is the only thing we can be sure exists, granting objective absolute existence instead to all those other bits and bobs and atoms and neurons—everything else but the mind—strikes me as logically inelegant overcomplication. While swapping the directionality of this causal arrow may be orthogonal to most of STEM fields as they are now (philosophical concerns are irrelevant to physics), it could have immense implications for fields like medicine and human well-being.
kabanossen 4y ago
There is our perception of reality but also how we make meaning of our perceptions, how we understand. For example colors that do not exist in the physical reality but are products of our perceptions and our interpretation of those perceptions. "The structure of the system of color categories is shaped by the neurophysiology of color vision, by our color cones and neural circuitry for color. Colors and color categories are not "out there" in the world but are interactional, a nontrivial product of wave length reflactances of objects and lighting conditions on the one hand, and our color cones and neural circuitry on the other. Color concepts and color-based inferences are thus structured by our bodies and brains." https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p4.html https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p4.html
LocalH 4y ago
We see reality as it is captured by our input sensors, and processed by our vision system. That signal chain is where the subjectivity comes into play, as well as the edge cases where our vision systems misidentify something, or see something that isn't actually happening. It also defines what our reality is, based on the capabilities of the sensors. The existence of optical illusions prove that we don't see reality "as it is", or those illusions would not exist, and we'd just see what was there. The existence of both color-blind people, and tetrachromats, also prove that we don't see reality "as it is". Look at any of the other species in the world with differing vision systems to understand that at most we see what reality is for humans. The really wild part of all of it is the way our brains can perceive things out of order, in a sense. The way our brains fill in microsaccades is wonderfully interesting. It's why the first tick of a second hand sometimes seems like it lingers.

45 points by akkartik 4y ago

He distinguishes between perception and reality, but at no point he defines reality. How could he know that a given perception is different from reality, when perception is already one of the ways of knowing reality (along with: Other senses, cognition, human consensus) ?

reilly3000 4y ago
Objective reality is a disturbingly difficult thing to prove.
- telmo 4y ago
  It is impossible to prove, because "objective reality" refers to a hypothetical reality that exists independently of the perceptions of conscious entities. The problem, of course, is that we are conscious entities and all of our experience of reality comes from our perceptions, and there is no conceivable way for us to experience reality if not through our perceptions. This is a very simple and even tautological conclusion, that a lot of smart people I know seem to have a hard time accepting. I think that this is because people assume that science assumes materialism, which it doesn't, of course. Science requires no metaphysical commitment.
  - implements 4y ago
    > Science requires no metaphysical commitment. https://iep.utm.edu/met-scie/ https://iep.utm.edu/met-scie/ or https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/48844/axioms-in-science-and-the-scientific-method https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/48844/axioms-... You can’t really do science without having certain metaphysical beliefs about the uniform nature of causality across time and space, for example.
    - rjbwork 4y ago
      Not necessarily uniform across all time and space, but certainly in the roughly observable universe. Definitely in our local solar system.
    - axilmar 4y ago
      > about the uniform nature of causality across time and space, for example. Nothing can exist without causality as we know it, i.e. a thing happens which is the cause of another thing that happens. That does not mean the order of events is as perceived, or that there is even an order of events. The order of events is the way observers perceive the events, and is independent of the cause and effect. For example, everything that happens in the universe may already have happened, at the instance the universe was born. But we, as members of the universe, perceive it as happening one thing at a time, like watching a movie already created.
      - n4r9 4y ago
        Causality is part of the framework that we might impose on our experience in order to make sense of it. It cannot be proved to be any more objective than our experience of sounds or colours. David Hume spoke a lot about this: https://iep.utm.edu/hume-causation/ https://iep.utm.edu/hume-causation/
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        > Nothing can exist without causality as we know it, i.e. a thing happens which is the cause of another thing that happens. Not only is this not true of all conceivable worlds, it's not even true for the most commonly accepted explanation of physics. In the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the value that will be observed in an experiment has no cause - it is random in some range. For example, if we detect an electron passing through the left slit of a double slit apparatus, there is no cause for why it passed through the left slit and not the right one (in the CI of QM).
        n4r9 4y ago
        I guess CI admits a weaker form of causality, in which an effect produced according to a determined probability distribution. But even this is part of the map rather than the territory.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    > It is impossible to prove, because "objective reality" refers to a hypothetical reality that exists independently of the perceptions of conscious entities. The problem, of course, is that we are conscious entities and all of our experience of reality comes from our perceptions, and there is no conceivable way for us to experience reality if not through our perceptions. Are our perceptions and experiences of reality not also a part of reality? If not, then what are they a part of? > This is a very simple and even tautological conclusion... This itself is an experience of reality, an objectively incorrect one if you ask me. > I think that this is because people assume that science assumes materialism, which it doesn't, of course. Science, having no volition, does not assume anything. Scientists on the other hand, whom I've spoken to hundreds of, very often do assume materialism. I personally believe that humans are unable to not assume most things, and as evidence I would present the content of all internet forums.
callesgg 4y ago
Donald seams to believe that “reality” is defined in the terms of something like... reality: “the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.” That definition allows him to make the argument that he makes; as the definition separates our ideas from the thing that reality is. It’s a definition with problems…
- passion__desire 4y ago
  Map vs Territory
LesZedCB 4y ago
this video needs no more than the caption: > John Carpenter's Dark Star - 1974 from phenomenology to cartesian skepticism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck bonus relevance for AI hubbub
- waseems 4y ago
  Thank you, this made my day :)
nine_k 4y ago
I'd say that there's a reality (whatever it is; some phenomena that can be observed in whatever ways), and there are models of it. Unless the reality has very particular properties (some kind of regularity / redundancy), every model of it is a simplification, so it has discrepancies. Even if the reality is regular and compressible perfectly into a model, it's rather hard to come up with such a model, and to prove it's the right one.
nix23 4y ago
It's the old "Is a falling tree creates a sound if no one hears it". The simple answer is NO, because there is no "compatible ear" that interprets those "sound"-waves, as sound. The reality is, it always creates waves but not sound.
- yamrzou 4y ago
  The better answer is to agree on how 'sound' should be defined, which would dissolve the question. “Do you think that 'sound' should be defined to require both acoustic vibrations (pressure waves in air) and also auditory experiences (someone to listen to the sound), or should 'sound' be defined as meaning only acoustic vibrations, or only auditory experience?” From: Disputing Definitions — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-definitions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...
  - nix23 4y ago
    >The better answer is to agree on how 'sound' should be defined, which would dissolve the question. No it's not because now you just define what sound is for humans. Pressure waves in the right frequency is interpreted as sound for humans. Same with colors, for most humans red is red. Frequencies are the reality, but sound/color is just a interpretation.
    - stagas 4y ago
      It's the other way around. Frequency is an abstraction. Sound/color is the reality.
      - nix23 4y ago
        >Sound/color is the reality. Have you ever had an argument with a bee if that flower is red? Or a blue-wale how Mozart sounds for him? Are waves on a body of water an abstraction? But your obviously a troll so i stop here.
        4y ago
yarg 4y ago
Hold your hand up and look at it, now (without moving your hand) look at the wall (or whatever else) beyond it. You'll perceive your hand in two different places - when it obviously isn't, because what you're perceiving is not reality, but the hack that allowed your ancestors to survive it.

dang 4y ago

Discussed at the time (barely): Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9782664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9782664 - June 2015 (1 comment)

pffft8888 4y ago

Interviews from the 70s with David Bohm about his cooncepts/theory of implicate and explicate order is much deeper and more sound than any TED talk about reality vs perception.

trabant00 4y ago

For me it's a simple problem of information size. A complete model of reality, aka the universe, takes this many bits. Our brains or computers have that many bits, obviously many, many orders of magnitude less. So any model we can actually make is an extremely lossy compression that will have horrible artifacts and distortions. But I also find this a truism, and quite a useless one. Of what help is pointing this out?

stagas 4y ago
The universe and the brain are just assumptions, you're already in the realm of imagination when you talk about them as they can't be empirically known. You only know what you experience right now, that could be the entirety of it. When you move from a place to another, you simply just imagine that new place. You join those thoughts coherently because you like to think logically, but otherwise nothing necessarily exists outside of perception.
- dalmo3 4y ago
  > nothing necessarily exists outside of perception Random thought: if a stray bullet hit you on the back of your head and you die, does perception end? And if so what caused that bullet?
  - stagas 4y ago
    I don't remember perception starting and so far i have no indication that it ends, so it's all assumptions here because "perception end" is something i cannot know, empirically.
- trabant00 4y ago
  While I agree I think my question still stands. Of what help is this? I can only talk to you about what I perceive in words and concepts that make sense to me, as flawed as they might be. Even if I would only imagine the existence of computers, forums and you, what can I do about it? How is this knowledge actionable?

panda-giddiness 4y ago

Consider that of the four fundamental forces, we can only directly probe two: gravity (via the inner ear) and electromagnetism (all other sensory organs).

jamesrom 4y ago
What do you mean by directly? Gravity is only sensed via an interaction between fluids and fine hairs in your inner ear. By that definition, we can also detect the weak interaction by feeling the sun on our face or the warmth of radioactive material.
- panda-giddiness 4y ago
  On the contrary, I'd be perfectly content classifying our probing of gravity/acceleration indirect, too. For completeness I include gravity because it's the only other fundamental interaction we arguably directly sense (inner ear fluid and fine hairs are part of the same sensory organ, unlike our skin and the sun). But I still suspect we would be able to sense gravity without inner ear fluid, even if only slightly. When we vigorously shake our head, the fluid flows against the hairs, so naturally the electromagnetic force and/or Pauli exclusion is mostly responsible for sensing. However, even absent any inner ear fluid, the hairs should still bend due to gravity -- I just don't know how appreciable the effect is.
  - jamesrom 4y ago
    > For completeness I include gravity because it's the only other fundamental interaction we arguably directly sense (inner ear fluid and fine hairs are part of the same sensory organ, unlike our skin and the sun). Not sure why the organ doing the sensing matters. I'm talking about thermoreceptors in the skin, obviously. But just to be clear, I'm saying that you're actually sensing electromagnetic force in your inner ear _caused by_ gravity. Not gravity itself. Even if the hairs bend due to gravity alone, that force upon the sensory receptors is an electromagnetic one. But if you consider that 'direct' then you must also consider sensing of the weak force, as 'direct'. Whether it be via thermoreceptors or your retina. tldr gravity : bending hairs :: weak interaction : radium glow

stagas 4y ago

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”. Reality is perception. It is one set of logical possibities that allow the thinking agent to exist and to produce the thoughts it is producing right now. It is the output of a pure function in which it creates itself and maintains its existence, constantly feeding its output to its input. Dreams are the exploration step of that function. Once in a while, the function creates a sandbox, feeds it with output gathered and classified as semi-coherent (adding in a few random bits), it simulates outcomes and picks out those fragments that didn't crash it. Those are then integrated back into its main code, into the world it imagines it inhabits, "reality".

quietcomments 4y ago
You can't have a perception without an external thing existing. If you're born tabula rasa and everything you know is learnt, then everything your senses know came from an external object which exists independently of your senses. Are we going to do Kant vs Nietschze until the end of time?
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  As long as Kant's would-be defenders defend counterfactual positions only, then I suppose there's no reason the debate would ever end. > If you're born tabula rasa There's lots of evidence that just isn't so. If nothing else, we appear to be equipped with minds which are better suited than random chance to build a "meaningful" model of the world around us.
- stagas 4y ago
  Ok but that's a hypothesis you make. To me it is absurd how an external object can exist independently of perception. What does it even mean that anything "exists" without senses to perceive it?
  - quietcomments 4y ago
    What are you perceiving if it doesn't really exist out there somewhere? The solar system existed before our senses received the information that it did. Insurance companies scan for pre-existing medical conditions before they discover them in new patients. Why would you seek new objects, if there were not objects out there to find? You have to sever all relationships to un-sensed, but knowable objects, to live only in the senses. That kind of reduction is too much to ask.

mhandley 4y ago

The problem with this talk is that it's almost content free. He has demonstrated that sometimes we (and other animals) misperceive things, or construct in our heads what we expect to see. He has demonstrated via simple virtual world models that simple artificial organisms evolve to perceive things that keep us alive and ignore other things. But what he has failed to do is tell us anything at all about how our perceptions generally differ from reality. Yes, the map is not the territory - we know that. Yes, we can't directly see atoms, we know that too, though we can with our machines. But other than being a low definition representation, he has not shown any important way in which the map differs from a low definition representation of reality, except that sometimes we make mistakes. He could be right, spacetime could just be the API, but he has presented no evidence for that.

mjburgess 4y ago
Well we do see atoms, and we see them directly -- in the sense that atoms are a direct cause of our perceptions. However what "seeing atoms" means at a "given resolution" differs. There's a long history of this paranoid game: we think the stick is bent! We were wrong! We didnt see the stick at all ! (false). Ah, but damn: how is it now we know we were wrong? How is it now that, when we took the stick out of the water, we know it isnt bent? Every sceptical example ever posed has this feature: it presumes that it is possible to be right. That is quite daming to the whole project of scepticism; it is, essentially, incoherent. Without the possibility of knowing the stick is bent, our mistake was never even a mistake. The very worry of being mistaken is a worry which presumes that truth & knowledege are the ordinary background of our experience.
- foolrush 4y ago
  > in the sense that atoms are a direct cause of our perceptions. I do not believe this is correct in any manner, and reduces the role of cognition. Jastrow’s work focuses on this departure between one context and higher order cognition.
  - mjburgess 4y ago

danbruc 4y ago

There is certainly truth to the claim that the brain abstracts over the raw sensory input. Reading, for example, would be a much more intractable problem if you had to do it in terms of photons hitting your retina instead of first abstracting the patterns on your retina into shapes, letters and words. But the leap from there is some abstraction going on to reality is nothing like the abstraction seems not [well] justified to me. And we can check it, we can build all kind of sensors and machines that interact with the world out there, cut out consciousness in the process, and see if the sensors report a world very different from how we perceive it. And they don't. There is of course a complication to this, constructing those sensors and machines and looking at what they are doing always has to pass through our perception, so maybe we accidentally build sensors that yield the same distorted version of reality as our brain does or the sensors are actually reporting a very different world but when we look at the sensor readings they get distorted to match the perception through our senses. But given all the ways and angles from which we can measure things and then transform and represent the results before perceiving them, I have a hard time imagining how it could always be coherently distorted to match our normal perception without showing any inconsistencies. And our perception and intuition is of course not perfect. Time and space, for example, are different from what our perception and experience tells us, but we managed to measure it and uncover the differences. But even in this case our perception and intuition are not really wrong, they are a very good approximation for everyday situations and only shows noticeable discrepancies in extreme circumstances.

arunix 4y ago

Related book on the same topic: https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019/12/24/book-review-the-case-against-reality-how-evolution-hid-the-truth-from-our-eyes/ https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019/12/24/book-review-the-...

strogonoff 4y ago

There’s also a paper, well worth a read: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0057...

csmeyer 4y ago
Scroll down to the section on Conscious Realism. This presents a mathematical basis for what "base reality" is: a graph of conscious agents, and our reality is merely a projection of that graph (we perceive elements of the projection, not the base graph). This to me is a much more powerful idea than the Ted talk which is a bit clickbaity.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  Yes. This reverses the popular physicalist understanding of causality from “neurons firing cause your mind” to “measurable changes in the brain are reflections of conscious activity”, and so on. This idealistic monism makes the most sense at a fundamental level. Since our mind is the only thing we can be sure exists, granting objective absolute existence instead to all those other bits and bobs and atoms and neurons—everything else but the mind—strikes me as logically inelegant overcomplication. While swapping the directionality of this causal arrow may be orthogonal to most of STEM fields as they are now (philosophical concerns are irrelevant to physics), it could have immense implications for fields like medicine and human well-being.

kabanossen 4y ago

There is our perception of reality but also how we make meaning of our perceptions, how we understand. For example colors that do not exist in the physical reality but are products of our perceptions and our interpretation of those perceptions. "The structure of the system of color categories is shaped by the neurophysiology of color vision, by our color cones and neural circuitry for color. Colors and color categories are not "out there" in the world but are interactional, a nontrivial product of wave length reflactances of objects and lighting conditions on the one hand, and our color cones and neural circuitry on the other. Color concepts and color-based inferences are thus structured by our bodies and brains." https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p4.html https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p4.html

LocalH 4y ago

We see reality as it is captured by our input sensors, and processed by our vision system. That signal chain is where the subjectivity comes into play, as well as the edge cases where our vision systems misidentify something, or see something that isn't actually happening. It also defines what our reality is, based on the capabilities of the sensors. The existence of optical illusions prove that we don't see reality "as it is", or those illusions would not exist, and we'd just see what was there. The existence of both color-blind people, and tetrachromats, also prove that we don't see reality "as it is". Look at any of the other species in the world with differing vision systems to understand that at most we see what reality is for humans. The really wild part of all of it is the way our brains can perceive things out of order, in a sense. The way our brains fill in microsaccades is wonderfully interesting. It's why the first tick of a second hand sometimes seems like it lingers.