Perception Deception

[stardustpilgrim]

This is sort of a public announcement. Last week on NOVA the program was entitled, Your Brain: Perception Deception. This week it's, Your Brain: Who's in Control? I watched Perception Deception twice, haven't seen Who's in Control? yet, it repeats tonight, PBS. It's basically about how we don't perceive directly what's in the world, perception is a construct which also combines memories with incoming data to form what we see. A prominent example was the blue dress or white-gold dress, the internet sensation of a few years ago, why different people see different colored dresses. The brain is a prediction machine, and combines these two sets of data to predict what's going to happen next. I have also been reading a new book on perception, and have been planning a new thread. So this is that, just haven't taken the time yet. Wanted to start it to give the heads up about the Your Brain programs. But, basically...

[stardustpilgrim]

This is a quote I just posted on another thread, the AI thread. It's what I haven't gotten around to yet, what I haven't taken the time for. It was an appropriate answer, there. From The Experience Machine, How Our Minds Predict and Shape the World by Andy Clark 2023

spiritualteachers.proboards.com/thread/5048/artificial-intelligence-side-story?q=stripped+bare+of+our+own+anticipations

ZD wrote: Of course, but what I'm saying is that no intellectual differentiation is necessary. What we are is so intelligent that it knows the world directly through the senses without the necessity of ideational reflection. If we want to say that subconscious mental processing is happening, that's okay, but all I'm doing is pointing to the distinction that the early Greeks made between gnosis and episteme. Animals, young children, and sages know (and interact with) the world via gnosis whereas most adults are in the habit of knowing (and interacting with) the world via episteme.


sdp quoted: Predictive processing speaks to one of the most challenging questions in science and philosophy--the nature of the relationships between our minds and reality. The theory, which has been steadily gaining momentum, changes our understanding of this relationship in ways that have far-reaching implications. Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the world of human experience, from the way we interpret a person's facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.

Nothing we do or experience--if the theory is on track--is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we--consciously or nonconsciously--were expecting it to tell us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what's "out there," stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom--the product of deep-set predictions. We can no more experience the world "prediction and expectation free" than we could surf without a wave. pages xii and xiii, the Preface to The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and shape Reality by Andy Clark, 2023 emphasis sdp