Starmen.Net

This is certainly an interesting idea.
I’m not entirely sure about hallucinating willingly. Our brains probably have some way of preventing us from doing that.

I remember there’s a certain disorder where you “see” sounds. I’ll have to look into it though.

RadScallion:

This is certainly an interesting idea.
I’m not entirely sure about hallucinating willingly. Our brains probably have some way of preventing us from doing that.

I remember there’s a certain disorder where you “see” sounds. I’ll have to look into it though.

Synesthesia. Your senses blend together in interesting ways.

maximuspinpoint:

So, I had a weird thought recently. I don’t know where to talk about it, so I’ll mention it here. It’s not really a question, just more of an idea. Anyway. Your eyes send brain signals to your brain as to what they interpret/see, right? It’s not like your vision is contained in the front of your eyes. You don’t have eyes inside of your eyes. So doesn’t that mean everything we “see” is just images generated inside our brain? Does this mean none of us see the “real”, “physical” world, it’s only manifesting in our minds? If it’s all manifested, does that explain hallucinations? Could we hallucinate willingly? Can we “see” what we “taste”, “hear”, “think”? Does this make any sense?

Anyway, sorry to waste your time, but I just found this thought interesting.

As always when the word “real” comes up, you have to first start with what you mean as “real”. If you mean real in the sense of existing, nothing can guarantee to you that anything but yourself truly does exist. My take on this personally is that it would require there to be some hidden aspect of myself so incredibly out of scale with the rest of me in size and behavior that it can barely even be considered “me”. My issues with solipsism aside, here’s the thing about your eye sending signals to your brain. It’s not wholly true that your eyes don’t have “eyes” of their own.

They receive light from the outside, and interpret the wavelengths they can detect as certain colors, and see objects as those colors based on what wavelengths of light they reflect. So we do in a fundamental way see the physical world, since it isn’t as if our brain is able to just make its vision up on the fly independently of the information we receive from our eyes (at least not entirely, there are some interesting things to be said about the “autofill” of peripheral vision). As for hallucinations, I’m admittedly not sure how those work. But the bottom line here is, our senses may not be the most accurate possible ways of understanding the physical world, but they do reflect it.

It turns out that, over generations and generations of life, having an accurate sense of what is around you helps you survive. So insofar as the question “Does this mean none of us see the real physical world?” I would say no, we have evolved eyes, ears, and the sensation of touch because perceiving the real physical world as accurately as possible is helpful for surviving.

That said, different animals perceive details of the world differently; spiders can supposedly sense electromagnetic radiation, cats and dogs can sense air currents and scents with their whiskers and nose, fish can gauge depth, bats evolved with echolocation, and so on. Modern science is pretty confident though that humans have done a pretty good job with their eyes to be able to tell where things are in the real world. Other species like eagles or cats might have better vision in specialized conditions, but we humans were able to design tools to help us see things almost as well.

In short, yes our perception of the world is processed in our brain. Like how your graphics card needs a CPU to display the images it generates into a form humans can easily understand.

I disagree with that. Survival is about being able to accurately assess risk, not overstate it or understate it, and our senses have been refined over thousands of years to try and show us reality as faithfully as possible. An example like you are suggesting is more akin to a situation where, because humans cannot see well in the dark, we imagine dangers that may not really be there. That is more of a psychological effect of fear that may cause you to see shapes in the shadows where there are none.

Because our eyes, ears, and nose are not perfect, fear is a helpful psychological tool to help us in situations where we are stretching the capabilities of our human senses to their maximum. Your brain may try to trick you, but only once you have reached the absolute limit of what you can perceive.

To convince me, it would take a few more examples of a scenario where having a perception disconnected from the physical reality is actually advantageous to survival.

To mention a few posts above, I don’t see how perceiving objects (be they predators or not) closer than they are in reality is advantageous. What if we wanted to hunt the animal? I would want a pretty accurate idea of where it is to be able to throw a rock or stick at it. Also, I really doubt that our brains would perceive distance differently for one object versus another, which would mean that every single object we see would be confusingly just out of reach if we tried to pick it up with our hands based on our perception of where in 3D space it is. Playing most sports would become difficult that way.

I think you might have missed the last part of my post. These psychological distortions of reality, for example caused by fear, are survival mechanisms for situations where something we cannot yet fully sense is happening. As the saying goes, it is the fear of the unknown that is universal across all animals. These distortions do not take effect until we have reached the limit of what we can perceive as humans, and then our brains take it from there to keep us safe. It does not undermine that having good and accurate perceptions correspond to a higher likelihood of surviving (i.e. responding to dangerous situations appropriately).

Things are getting heated in the vision fandom.

You can see him. Yet he isn’t real. Checkmate, reality-believers.

I mean, yes. Your consciousness is permanently trapped and embodied in the hunk of meat you call your brain. If the signals from your nerves to your brain become interrupted or altered in some way, you will perceive reality differently or not at all. Your brain can also process things weirdly or generate things that aren’t there (“hallucination”). Strictly speaking, I guess there’s no real way to prove you aren’t just a brain connected to a very elaborate computer simulation like in the Matrix or something. That said, there’s no real reason to believe that’s true either, so you might as well just keep living your life :p