Our brains exist in a state of “controlled hallucination” - MIT Technology Review

^{( August 25, 2021; MIT Technology Review )}

Prediction has come into vogue in academic circles in recent years. Seth and the philosopher Andy Clark, a colleague at Sussex, refer to predictions made by the brain as “controlled hallucinations.” The idea is that the brain is always constructing models of the world to explain and predict incoming information; it updates these models when prediction and the experience we get from our sensory inputs diverge.

“Chairs aren’t red,” Seth writes, “just as they aren’t ugly or old-fashioned or avant-garde … When I look at a red chair, the redness I experience depends both on properties of the chair and on properties of my brain. It corresponds to the content of a set of perceptual predictions about the ways in which a specific kind of surface reflects light.”

This article reviews ideas on mind from three books:

• Being You, by Anil Seth
• Coming to Our Senses, by Susan Barry
• What Makes Us Smart, by Samuel Gershman

The "controlled hallucination" idea comes from Seth, who goes on to argue that "reality" is when we all agree on our mentally constructed hallucinations. Barry's book describes her observations of subjects who described their experiences with navigating the world after gaining the ability to see or hear as adults. One of Barry's conclusions is that, "since the world and everything in it is constantly changing, it’s surprising that we can recognize anything at all." (which reminds me of Godell quote, "The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.") Gershman suggests that two biases drive the brain's functioning, "inductive bias" - or a preference for certain hypotheses - and "approximation bias", which is the desire to implement mental shortcuts.

The article also refers to a concept that has fascinated me for a couple of decades, the so-called "hard problem of consciousness":

This concept was popularized by David Chalmers.

Read the rest from MIT Technology Review: Our brains exist in a state of “controlled hallucination”