There is no spoon....

[Nearly Sane]

Interesting article on how unreal reality is.


http://tinyurl.com/j65of7h

[L.A.]

Interesting article on how unreal reality is.


http://tinyurl.com/j65of7h

I don't think I quite agree with the language. It's not so much that reality is an illusion, it's more a case that our senses and brain 'pre-process' the information to filter only the bits that have proved most relevant to our survival, before presenting it to the conscious mind, but in doing so, information is lost.

[wigginhall]

It is interesting.  I was taught at uni that scientists observe appearances, which is a neat way of avoiding the issue of reality or truth.   I suppose the issue then is one of utility, as he seems to be saying about evolution. 

Quite an old idea, I guess, but it is having some flesh put on it now in cognitive science and neuroscience. 

[Stranger]

Hummm....

Quantum mechanics says that classical objects—including brains—don’t exist.

I don't think may physicists would agree.

[Shaker]

Interesting article, but to me pretty comprehensively unconvincing. His attempted rebuttal of an, or the, evolutionary argument for broadly accurate realism struck me as especially thin and specious.

[torridon]

I don't think I quite agree with the language. It's not so much that reality is an illusion, it's more a case that our senses and brain 'pre-process' the information to filter only the bits that have proved most relevant to our survival, before presenting it to the conscious mind, but in doing so, information is lost.

It's way more complicated and way more radical than that.  For sure consciousness is a prioritising system, but it is much more, it fabricates our experience of reality on the fly and we cannot know what a 'raw' reality would be like if it were possible to detect it. We can only experience a take on reality and in our case we are stuck with the take of the human brain.  We hear sounds, but sounds as such aren't out there - they are an inner interpretation of patterns of shock waves. We see colours, but colours aren't out there, 'colours' out there are actually distances (of wavelengths); we feel heat but heat is really speed (of particles).  All our experience is a transformational rendering into seemingly ineffable and irreducible qualia.  Here is a TED talk by Hoffman on our perception of reality :

https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?language=en

 

[L.A.]

It's way more complicated and way more radical than that.  For sure consciousness is a prioritising system, but it is much more, it fabricates our experience of reality on the fly and we cannot know what a 'raw' reality would be like if it were possible to detect it. We can only experience a take on reality and in our case we are stuck with the take of the human brain.  We hear sounds, but sounds as such aren't out there - they are an inner interpretation of patterns of shock waves. We see colours, but colours aren't out there, 'colours' out there are actually distances (of wavelengths); we feel heat but heat is really speed (of particles).  All our experience is a transformational rendering into seemingly ineffable and irreducible qualia.  Here is a TED talk by Hoffman on our perception of reality :

https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?language=en

I agree with all that, every street magician knows some of the 'hacks' we employ in our perception. I was just pointing out that our senses actually take in a whole lot of information that we filter out without even being aware of the process.

Let's face it, if we perceived reality 'as it was' all we would get would be masses of quantum particles popping in and out of existence.

[Gonnagle]

Dear Sane and Torridon,

WOO!! Heavy duty man is there a spoon, who cares but there better be a knife and fork as I tuck into my square sausage, black pudding, egg, fried tomato and tottie scone ( no beans, beans over power a good fry up ) very interesting stuff, the links not my fry up.

Gonnagle.