HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

You can see in your peripheral vision, but not clearly, and not colors. This is because the cones in the eye are all in the center, and they are responsible for most of your daytime vision. Around the cones are rods, they are used for night vision and motion detection. The colors you see in your peripheral vision are not real, but an illusion made by the brain.

This Ted gives some good examples https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucina...

⬐ PavlikPaja

I know, it's less clear, but there are colors, I have tested that with a random color generator. The colors are imprecise in the far periphery, but the basic colors can still be seen.

I guess my vision may indeed be abnormal as somebody else above suggested, since I don't get the blid spot in the central vision in the dark, either.

As for the sound, I think you just learn to hear the sine waves as speech - I tried to convert a part of audiobook (that I haven't listened to before) and I can understand it a little bit. I used praat with this script (it doesn't seem to like long sounds): http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave-spe...

Check out this: https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucina...

Neural nets are doing something that the mind does too - it takes visual input, then it "predicts" and "fills in the blanks" (aka hallucinates) so that you "see" what you expect to see. Its why you dont notice your blind spot.

Its also interesting to note that this process appears to change as we age: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474569125/your-brain-on-lsd-l...

If you are unable to observe a thing directly, and instead could only see it through a distortion lens, would you want the opportunity to look at it through multiple different distortion lenses instead of just one?

The world we know is largely constructed by semi-conscious and sub-conscious processes, from world building processes (such as how the mind filters and modifies information to construct our reality), to conclusions we make about the world, ourselves, and what is possible (emotionally motivated reasoning, decision heuristics, predictive modeling).

Google deep dream provides interesting insight into psychedelic phenomena, and hints at what is changing in the mind’s world-building process when on those substances.

When it comes to MDMA, because it so dramatically changes emotion, it can also dramatically shift reasoning and thinking heuristics that unconsciously originate from emotion. This can transform beliefs that you once took for self-evident fact, into things that you now realize represent how you feel more than reality.

Some further reading that I found very valuable: World Building Process: https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucina... Deep Dream: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/07/goo...

⬐ None

None

⬐ twiss

"Consciousness" is used to mean lots of different things. The video talks about how we perceive ("are conscious of") the world and ourself.

I suspect that if we saw that a cat perceives the world and itself in much the same way as us, and acts on its observations, we would not hesitate long to believe it was conscious.

However, a computer can also be taught to perceive the world and itself, and act on its observations, and we would not call it conscious, because we think that it's still not aware that it's doing all that. But then we could teach it that. Etc. It's hard to formulate what's missing, but we humans feel conscious in a way that's more than just observation and introspection.

I suspect that once we no longer understand computers, we will eventually start to think of them as conscious too. Whether they really are will probably be impossible to know. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Consciousness

⬐ eighthnate

His lecture at the Royal Institution is better and more in depth.

https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI

Worth a watch if you have an hour to spare.

⬐ yellowboxtenant

There's not a whole lot that has changed in our theory of consciousness between the the establishment of French existentialism, via Husserl, and this video.

⬐ roceasta

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a dream.

A dream with error correction. When error correction is faulty due to being irrational, or asleep, or on certain drugs, all sorts of strange things appear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8s-K_TPCU#t=22s

⬐ tpeo

Isn't this just representationalism?

I mean, I get that this presentation is based on more empirical grounds and on material which is more fleshed out than the speculations of long dead philosophers. But unless a person is unfamiliar with indirect realism, there isn't anything inherently mind-blowing about the idea of a "controlled hallucination". And this is what this TED talk is about.

I think this is the TED talk that forms the basis of this article: https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucina.... TL;DR: It proposes that the brain's main function is to predict both the outer and inner reality based on sensory electrical signals.