Hallucinating Reality | How To Create A Mind #2

Written by on June 29, 2021

“The Sensory Pathway

Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision.

—Isaac Newton

Each of us lives within the universe—the prison—of his own brain. Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibers, in groups uniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world around us: heat, light, force, and chemical composition. That is all we ever know of it directly; all else is logical inference.

—Vernon Mountcastle

These quotes, mentioned in “How To Create a Mind”, reminds me of an idea that I came across while reading and researching Rene Descartes. The idea is that we don’t actually have direct experience of the world, only indirect. Our brain or mind isn’t looking out through holes or windows in our head. Our eyes and other sensory organs pick up the energetic states of the world around us and send those signals to the brain and then over to the mind. If our mind is in part our subjective experience, then we only directly experience that sensory data and not the external world. The data represents a piece of the world but you wouldn’t say it’s interchangeable with the world. 

If you look at a chair, it feels as though your mind is directly experiencing or seeing the chair, but you are indirectly experiencing the chair. What your mind and perception is directly experiencing is the sensory data being filtered through your body as signals to the brain, compiled by our perception and then interpreted by our minds.

“Although we experience the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just a series of outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of movies with very low data rates that arrive in parallel channels.”

We see that our mind isn’t looking at the world directly, we are taking in all the sensory data and then our imagination is hallucinating and constructing the part of the world we’re looking at. A big reason why this is important is because the sensory data can be tricked, polluted, contaminated or hijacked. We don’t need to be living in the matrix for this to be true, mental disorders which cause hallucinations of all kinds exist. For an interesting list of the different hallucinations people can experience check out this article I found here.

“In a study published in Nature, Frank S. Werblin, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, and doctoral student Boton Roska, MD, showed that the optic nerve carries ten to twelve output channels, each of which carries only a small amount of information about a given scene. One group of what are called ganglion cells sends information only about edges (changes in contrast). Another group detects only large areas of uniform color, whereas a third group is sensitive only to the backgrounds behind figures of interest.”

This touches on another interesting idea that led me to believe that the mind is not the same as the brain and that it’s not simply a product of the brain. I had a lot of paradigm shifts that contributed to this bigger shift, which led me to start identifying more with my mind and less with my physical self. Before that all I believe I was, was this meaty fleshy object that could think and feel. I will be going over this particular idea more in posts for “Your Mind and How To Use It” but in summary, there is something in neuroscience sometimes called the neural binding problem. Like the above quotation points out, there are nerves and parts of the brain which deal with the shapes which we are looking at. There are other nerves and areas of the brain which process the colors that we are looking at. But nowhere in the physical brain, is there a place which combines all this information into the movie screen like picture or video of reality that we experience every waking moment of our lives. It’s our imagination presenting the world to our subjective experience. 

If the finished picture or our view of reality isn’t getting composed in the brain then where does our subjective experience happen? It’s worth noting that the entire visual system of the brain has been mapped, so it’s not like they just haven’t found it yet. They have mapped everything related to our visual system and this aspect was not found in the physical brain. So, perhaps it exists in a nonphysical form.