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Consciousness and sensory perception

I

Infinite Bubble

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This is something I've been thinking about for a while now... how does it happen, that we perceive things the way we do? For instance, how do we perceive colours or hear things - the very quality of them, not the physical process. Why are the senses like they are, why and how are they experienced as they are? Why is the perception of sound the way it is? Once again, not the actual mechanism in the body that allows us to experience it, but why it is experienced in very nature that it is.

Obviously it is related to the nature of consciousness. But it is a mystery how processes in the universe would conjure up something that perceives in this way. For instance, short-wavelength light enters our eyes etc and we experience what we would call 'blue' or 'purple'. But how does this perception exist in the manner that we see it - why is it like that, or how? Same with sounds or touch or taste or smell. Hopefully I am making myself clear.
 

Alea_iacta_est

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I've thought about this recently as well, and I have introspected and figured some things out that seem absolutely insane.
The world seems completely different to each individual and loosely similar among people's families. How have I figured this out? Well first I came to the realization that all of our senses are calculated and simulated inside our innovative computer we call our brain, which looking at it from a realistic perspective means that we never actually see anything in the outside world but what our brain wants our consciousness to see. This means that we are limited to only what our brain picks up on, and that the outside world could be infinitely different from how we render it inside our head.

A real world example: People with Aspergers Syndrome tend to experience hypersensitivity to sounds, lights, smells, tastes, etc. and Aspergers Syndrome is also presumed to be genetic. One may conclude that the way they perceive the world is passed down through the family tree along with the syndrome itself (because its part of the syndrome). The only problem is that we cannot do this with people without mental disorders, for all mentally healthy individuals are grouped into the same category, "normal". But normal could vary for different people when it comes to how we render the world.

Just my thoughts on the subject, and this is an interesting thread by the way.
 

Lady_X

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i think it's fascinating too because not only are we all picking up different things we are making different associations to them based not only on our completely unique memory banks but also on our particular set of sensitivities or thresholds.

also curious is sensory processing disorder and how it may or may not have anything to do with being strong n dominate. ??

and! the insane realization that our brains and eyesight are limited in their ability to actually see the full reality...and how much of this is on a spectrum? how much does this differ between individuals and we're not even aware of it...besides the fact that some claim to see auras or energy or feel vibrations etc that others do not.

or even hear voices from the otherside etc

sorry...just took that all of course didn't i?
 
I

Infinite Bubble

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I've thought about this recently as well, and I have introspected and figured some things out that seem absolutely insane.
The world seems completely different to each individual and loosely similar among people's families. How have I figured this out? Well first I came to the realization that all of our senses are calculated and simulated inside our innovative computer we call our brain, which looking at it from a realistic perspective means that we never actually see anything in the outside world but what our brain wants our consciousness to see. This means that we are limited to only what our brain picks up on, and that the outside world could be infinitely different from how we render it inside our head.

A real world example: People with Aspergers Syndrome tend to experience hypersensitivity to sounds, lights, smells, tastes, etc. and Aspergers Syndrome is also presumed to be genetic. One may conclude that the way they perceive the world is passed down through the family tree along with the syndrome itself (because its part of the syndrome). The only problem is that we cannot do this with people without mental disorders, for all mentally healthy individuals are grouped into the same category, "normal". But normal could vary for different people when it comes to how we render the world.

Just my thoughts on the subject, and this is an interesting thread by the way.

Ah yes, it is an interesting concept that everything we perceive is personal to us. I think you're right in that the world is similar to how our parents see it considering genetics, but one thing that stops me from believing that it is completely different for everyone e.i. my blue is nothing like your blue, is that all human brains are physiologically similar and apart from mutations remain relatively similar. So I'm thinking there are slight difference, but nothing drastic. But agreed, the objective universe is probably completely different to how the human brain interprets it, but that subjectivity is collectively alike. It would be remarkable though if it was completely different for everyone... what if the forms I see visually are nothing like anyone elses for instance? And all the other senses are lined up with that to create this subjective experience on a personal level...

But it still doesn't answer why we perceive in the way we do - even if it is wholly subjective, something makes the experience appear in such a fashion. What is happening exactly in the universe, how does the system actually work, to create the sensory perceptions. I suppose how consciousness manifests needs to be understood first. I think consciousness is a manifestation from higher dimensions than what we perceive, and so its nature is extremely difficult to comprehend because what makes it up cannot be directly, or even indirectly, observed.

Anyway... blah, blah and more blah. Maybe it's unanswerable. Most cannot even put into words what the experience of a colour or sound itself is.
 
I

Infinite Bubble

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i think it's fascinating too because not only are we all picking up different things we are making different associations to them based not only on our completely unique memory banks but also on our particular set of sensitivities or thresholds.

That's a good point, we're inherently biased by individual experience, and who knows what differences this would cause. I was thinking, if someone was hypothetically placed in isolation from birth, in a nondescript room of sorts, how that would affect their perception in comparison to the rest of us. The very terms 'blue' or 'red' may just be societal concepts we all agree on because we are taught it, even though what is actually seen is different depending on the individual. How would this person perceive when all they have in their memorybanks is a single room to associate with?

also curious is sensory processing disorder and how it may or may not have anything to do with being strong n dominate. ??

N dominants supposedly have a problem with sensory data, for instance, inf-Se being hypersensitive to outside noises, and inf-Si more being this way with body sensations (hyperchondriacism) so that is plausible.

and! the insane realization that our brains and eyesight are limited in their ability to actually see the full reality...and how much of this is on a spectrum? how much does this differ between individuals and we're not even aware of it...besides the fact that some claim to see auras or energy or feel vibrations etc that others do not.

Indeed, only the tiniest amount of reality do we see. Even other animals get it better in some respects - such as vision going through to ultraviolet, and birds being able to see magnetic fields. It's still a small portion nevertheless.

They'll be people more sensitive than others, so maybe that's how some claim to feel energy vibrations and whatnot.

or even hear voices from the otherside etc

Probably hallucinations now. :D

sorry...just took that all of course didn't i?

Heh, it's all interesting anyway.
 

Alea_iacta_est

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We can never fully understand why we sense what we do, for we are not the creators of ourselves (which could be taken both spiritually and non-spiritually). We can figure out how we experience what we do by looking at the inner functions of our body, such as cones in the eye and the ear drum in the ear. But why vibrations are experienced as sound and why light is experienced as sight and why flavor is experienced by taste is simply impossible to know with what we have today. It could be that through evolution we evolved this exact way to deal with various crises, or that we were simply engineered this way by a higher power (I'm inclined to believe the first one, but I digress). And remember, there have been several instances where other human beings have developed different senses or sense disorders. The most interesting of which seems to be tetrachromacy (present in about .4 percent in females and drastically less in males), or having a fourth cone in the eye, widening the color spectrum from a few million to hundreds of millions (fourth cone supposedly detects a fourth primary color that exists in the ultraviolet spectrum). Synesthesia is a disorder where neurons are confused as to the input of sensory information they are given and send sensory information to the wrong part of the brain, i.e. smelling colors, hearing tastes, etc. All in all, we can only speculate as to why we sense the way we do.
 
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WALMART

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You are presupposing the experience of reality can be partitioned away from the physical presence of existence.
 

RaptorWizard

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"I appreciate the inestimable value of introspection in the preservation of life, as well as a means of achievement.

The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness through all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways.

Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves."
~ Nikola Tesla
 
I

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You are presupposing the experience of reality can be partitioned away from the physical presence of existence.

No, I'm not, that premise is the exact reason why this thread exists. Why does physical reality create such an experience in conscious beings? How do the specific processes create such an outcome? What exact qualities of the universe make it this way?

Unless existence (or perception of) is an effect of the mind and not the other way round.
 

Mole

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Qualia and Distinction

Yes, it's called qualia which is subjective, conscious experience.

However we perceive by making distinctions.

So until we make a distinction we see nothing, and the more distinctions we make, the more we see.

Of course we have the illusion of seeing something directly but the reality is that we only perceive by making distinctions.
 

zago

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It's all completely random. There is 0 context to life if you really think about it. Things we take for granted are actually incredibly bizarre. Like a lamp, for instance. If we lived in a dark universe or if we simply didn't depend on light to live, we would have absolutely no context for what a lamp is. The idea of a lamp would be mind boggling. Then again it would also be a similar experience for someone who had no idea what electricity is. One time I drank a bottle of cough syrup and turned out the lights and closed my eyes. I saw a bunch of things like this - things that I had no context for, so I really can't describe them. But they were clearly things. Maybe they were from the future, or another galaxy across the universe. I just wonder, where did my mind come up with them? Very mysterious.

Try to explain the color red to a blind person.
Try to describe sound to a deaf person using sign language.
Think about the senses we could have, but don't.
Think about what would remain if we didn't have sight, smell, taste, touch, or hearing.
And where do these things occur? What is the medium on which my senses manifest themselves? When I see, there is an image. What is it on?

And earlier today I thought, isn't life as we know it kind of an insanely ridiculous way for nature to achieve a profoundly simple goal? To basically help dissipate energy, as has been done since the beginning of time? That's all it is. 2nd law of thermodynamics told me so. Every process that arises is simply one that will help lower the energy state of the universe. And "I" "need" "to" "get of my" "ass" and "pay" "my rent" "on" "time." Ya know? It's all pretty random.
 

zago

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It's a common mistake to think Natural Selection is random. It's not.

You missed the point, and I don't think natural selection is random. The color red, for instance, is random. Why is it red? Why isn't it something else, some color we have never seen or conceived of? Why is it color at all?

Or what if you asked me what matter is, and I said, attempting to get to the most fundamental answer possible, "matter is quarks." But what are quarks? Why quarks? Why not something else? Quarks ultimately come no closer to a fundamental answer than nucleons and electrons, or atoms, or molecules, etc. However enormous our universe seems, it's nothing compared to the infinite. For our one universe, there could be trillions upon trillions of others each filled with different things, even having wildly different physical laws. I would perhaps call it "the unmanifest."

Flexing your mind a bit, you can get a vague sense of this quite liberating feeling. For instance, I look back into the past and times that were, and think about how insanely different cultures were back then. Those times were so diverse, so unique, so detailed, so rich... and yet they are the TINIEST slivers in history, there for the blink of an eye and then gone forever. My past experience with drugs like salvia, dxm, and mushrooms also reminds me of things and ways of perceiving that could be, but aren't. On salvia I'd find myself in these fully immersive, rich, ecosystems that were most importantly, almost completely foreign to life as I know it. On DXM, I could remove myself from the context of my life (we get so wrapped up in the little things that happen to us) and see the cosmic picture. From there, I understood how infinitesimal my existence is.

And that's what RANDOM is. There were infinite possibilities, and we happened to wind up with... THIS. What we see is the backwater of the backwater in time and space. They have no relevance to the whole, none whatsoever. They couldn't. There is no center. We are a grain of sand on the ocean, but we have taken that grain of sand and turned it into something it is not. We have pretended that the features, the very notion, of this tiny grain of sand are somehow important, that they somehow have a place in the grand scheme of things. We don't see things for what they are - complete and utter nonsense. A joke.

A joke.. yes, that's what best describes this. The punchline is kind of like god is saying, LOL, look how strange this is. Look how useless, how pointless. What is the point of life? There clearly isn't one. We are going to die. We are going to be erased. Even Alexander the Great, for all he conquered, amounts to absolutely nothing in the end. Everything we will ever be or not be would pretty much have happened anyway.

Perhaps that is liberation. Perhaps that enables us to enjoy the divine spectacle that is life. Just give up, stop fighting and accept it, and maybe you can see.
 
I

Infinite Bubble

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Yes, it's called qualia which is subjective, conscious experience.

However we perceive by making distinctions.

So until we make a distinction we see nothing, and the more distinctions we make, the more we see.

Of course we have the illusion of seeing something directly but the reality is that we only perceive by making distinctions.

Ah, thanks for that, just what I was thinking of.

Distinctions yes... but why are these distinctions experienced as so? Is your blue the same as my blue?

You missed the point, and I don't think natural selection is random. The color red, for instance, is random. Why is it red? Why isn't it something else, some color we have never seen or conceived of? Why is it color at all?

Or what if you asked me what matter is, and I said, attempting to get to the most fundamental answer possible, "matter is quarks." But what are quarks? Why quarks? Why not something else? Quarks ultimately come no closer to a fundamental answer than nucleons and electrons, or atoms, or molecules, etc. However enormous our universe seems, it's nothing compared to the infinite. For our one universe, there could be trillions upon trillions of others each filled with different things, even having wildly different physical laws. I would perhaps call it "the unmanifest."

Flexing your mind a bit, you can get a vague sense of this quite liberating feeling. For instance, I look back into the past and times that were, and think about how insanely different cultures were back then. Those times were so diverse, so unique, so detailed, so rich... and yet they are the TINIEST slivers in history, there for the blink of an eye and then gone forever. My past experience with drugs like salvia, dxm, and mushrooms also reminds me of things and ways of perceiving that could be, but aren't. On salvia I'd find myself in these fully immersive, rich, ecosystems that were most importantly, almost completely foreign to life as I know it. On DXM, I could remove myself from the context of my life (we get so wrapped up in the little things that happen to us) and see the cosmic picture. From there, I understood how infinitesimal my existence is.

And that's what RANDOM is. There were infinite possibilities, and we happened to wind up with... THIS. What we see is the backwater of the backwater in time and space. They have no relevance to the whole, none whatsoever. They couldn't. There is no center. We are a grain of sand on the ocean, but we have taken that grain of sand and turned it into something it is not. We have pretended that the features, the very notion, of this tiny grain of sand are somehow important, that they somehow have a place in the grand scheme of things. We don't see things for what they are - complete and utter nonsense. A joke.

A joke.. yes, that's what best describes this. The punchline is kind of like god is saying, LOL, look how strange this is. Look how useless, how pointless. What is the point of life? There clearly isn't one. We are going to die. We are going to be erased. Even Alexander the Great, for all he conquered, amounts to absolutely nothing in the end. Everything we will ever be or not be would pretty much have happened anyway.

Perhaps that is liberation. Perhaps that enables us to enjoy the divine spectacle that is life. Just give up, stop fighting and accept it, and maybe you can see.

Thanks for your insight. I don't have much to add, but I like that; a joke. I think a large problem is that we use the biased frameworks that we are naturally orientated towards to navigate our 'ordinary' lives, but then apply it (and that's all we have to apply) to larger questions that aren't applicable to the wider context. So we ask why and how things are the way they are and ask what the meaning of things are but it doesn't work because we know nothing that goes a little bit further than our paradigm. We'll ask "what's the point?", which works down here on earth, but it doesn't work with anything else. We want there to be a meaning and expect one, because if we know our environment, we'll be able to survive against our rivals. There'll be concepts that make up existence that are simply beyond us and that we can't ever fathom. But we can try, of course...

And no matter what form our universe would be in, if we existed within it, we'd question why it is like that. We can imagine all the other combinations and ask why it isn't one of those. But the thing is, imagination is just the reordering of things we've experienced in the past, e.i. what's in our universe. We can't imagine past our universe, no matter how wild we think our imagination is.

If you're feeling adventurous, try conceiving what Existence was it like before the Big Bang. :einstein2:

The depends on whether or not the BB was the 'beginning' of existence itself, or merely the beginning of the state we know of today. If it's the former, then the question's inapplicable, but if it's the latter, who knows? It could have been a universe contracting into a big crunch, which then rebounds and expands again and so on indefinitely. Or it could have a completely different form, with different physics, or maybe the whole notion of physics is limited to our universe.
 

1487610420

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The depends on whether or not the BB was the 'beginning' of existence itself, or merely the beginning of the state we know of today. If it's the former, then the question's inapplicable, but if it's the latter, who knows? It could have been a universe contracting into a big crunch, which then rebounds and expands again and so on indefinitely. Or it could have a completely different form, with different physics, or maybe the whole notion of physics is limited to our universe.

Go with the former just to humor me, and try wrapping your head around it.
 

Mole

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Perhaps that is liberation. Perhaps that enables us to enjoy the divine spectacle that is life. Just give up, stop fighting and accept it, and maybe you can see.

I think your drug history has cut you off from reality.

Your fevered imaginings on drugs are based on no empirical evidence.

What you want is for us to validate your religion of drugs.

Fat chance.
 
W

WhoCares

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Society agrees and accepts that reality is somehow this absolute thing. That it can be observed, recorded and investigated from some imaginary idea called objectivity. I tend to think reality or existence is more complex than that. Its not just a lump we can prod and all agree on. Why is it that five people can all witness the same events yet all come up with different ideas on what happened? Reality either reflects our perceptions or internal world or it is a fluid thing with facets we can either see or not. Maybe people agree on an objective reality existing just because its too frightening to think that we actually influence what we see and there could simultaneously be a whole host of things undetected by us going on in our space that we are not a party to. Maybe the things we perceive as coincidence is just one little blip in a chain of events in which we are unknowlingly participating in but all we can see is that one person who pops up on our radar, says or done something random, which we then ascribe meaning to because it connects with a previous blip. The actual meaning escapes us because we can only sense 0.0000001% of what actually happened.

We all theorise in the existence of other universes, but what if we were actually in those other universes while being in this one. Yet the other universe is wholly undetected by us because it falls outside of our defined ability to sense or perceive. What if the sky, which instead of being empty is actually a crowded alien city which we are simply failing to perceive because the frequency of our senses fall beyond that range. Maybe cats, dogs or other animals can see that other universe and that is why dogs bark at seemingly nothing and cats hiss down empty hallways.
 

zago

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I think your drug history has cut you off from reality.

Your fevered imaginings on drugs are based on no empirical evidence.

What you want is for us to validate your religion of drugs.

Fat chance.

I want you to validate my religion of drugs? Lol that really makes no sense given what I posted; you must have some preconceived notion or something. All I said was that taking drugs back in the day allowed me to see different, even completely foreign perspectives. What I said doesn't need empirical evidence, any more than is already out there anyway. How we perceive reality is clearly a mere matter of what molecules interact with our brains. Change them slightly, and you experience a different version of reality altogether. Which is to say, I see that as a pointer to how many different ways of perceiving there are, and how narrow our experience truly is. Regarding drugs, I don't even take them anymore, haven't touched 'em in at least 3 years but probably more cause I've lost count. So I'm not sure why I would be cut off from reality or want you to validate my "religion of drugs."
 

Mole

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I want you to validate my religion of drugs? Lol that really makes no sense given what I posted; you must have some preconceived notion or something. All I said was that taking drugs back in the day allowed me to see different, even completely foreign perspectives. What I said doesn't need empirical evidence, any more than is already out there anyway. How we perceive reality is clearly a mere matter of what molecules interact with our brains. Change them slightly, and you experience a different version of reality altogether. Which is to say, I see that as a pointer to how many different ways of perceiving there are, and how narrow our experience truly is. Regarding drugs, I don't even take them anymore, haven't touched 'em in at least 3 years but probably more cause I've lost count. So I'm not sure why I would be cut off from reality or want you to validate my "religion of drugs."

Alas homo sapiens has only one way of perceiving, and that is, we perceive by making distinctions.

And frankly I don't believe you could see differently, I think you saw in the same way but saw different things, and interpreted that mistakenly as a difference in perception.

If you would like to pursue the mathematics of distinctions, you might like, The Laws of Form by G. Spencer-Brown, click on http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Laws.pdf
 
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