
Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - amelius
https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality
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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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8s-K_TPCU#t=22s)

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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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Consciousness)

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

[https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI](https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI)

Worth a watch if you have an hour to spare.

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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.

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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.

