From: brent.allsop@attbi.com
Date: Thu Feb 13 2003 - 16:50:38 MST
Lee,
>>>(by the way, welcome back to the list, Brent!)<<<
Thanks! It’s great to be back.
>>> No, I guess that the closest I'm coming so far to your
position is a 2D picture of the 3D object. You believe
that there is a little 3D model of the external object
somewhere in the brain. Right? <<<
The thing we know for certain is that subjectively, the information is 3D.
There are many great, IMO, arguments that it is indeed more or less 3D in the
brain also – but this need not be the case.
For example lets take your 2D picture and look at the layer of neurons just in
front of (closer to the center of the brain) than where the scientists found
the picture of the display. I would argue that this layer likely represents
the space just in front of the monitor. (Of course since the space in front of
the monitor is empty the people observing the monkeys brain wouldn’t have
noticed anything even if they were looking for something.)
You could take some of these neurons in front of the display and move them to
some other different location in the brain, while maintaining the same synaptic
connections and subjectively the experience would be the same 3D one even
though the spatial location in the brain was now different. But the more you
have this kind of deviation, the longer and more complex the synapse wiring has
to be to achieve the same subjective experience. This is simply one good
argument for real 3D representations.
But this is all of lesser importance to the fact that we experience a real 3D
subjective space. There is some way that our brain represents this subjective
space, even if it isn’t with actual voxel (3D pixel) neurons in the same 3D
configuration.
>>>Well, again, the words can mean either thing. It's a
little bit like the puzzler "do we see airplanes, or
do we see the photons reflected off the airplanes?"
I like to say that we see the airplanes, but I know
what people mean when they say that we see photons.<<<
Precisely. The only thing that sees the airplane is the photons. The only
thing that sees the photons is the surface of our retina… and so on down the
causal chain of perception. It is physically impossible for us to be directly
aware of the airplain the way it SEEMS we do.
Finally all this cause and effect results in a subjectively 3D representation
of the airplane with a subjective representation of ourselves looking out holes
in our skulls at it. All of this subjective information being in our brain.
When we say "we see the airplane" this entire process is what this means. We
must remember that cause and effect perception only goes one way. It SEEMS
like we look out of the holes in our skulls through the windows of our eyes to
see the airplane, but in reality the cause and effect of perception flows in
the opposite direction. You have to think very carefully not to think
irrationally about this.
>>>What you need to stress---and you do---
is that there is some kind of true-to-life model in
the brain, whereas I think that most people on this
list believe that the representation of objects in
the brain is much more subtle, the encoding much, much
more obscure. <<<
People tend to think this way when they aren’t thinking clearly and rationally
about how cause and effect perception works. People think that red is
something on the airplane and they think our brain doesn’t require anything
like red to represent this. If people would just stop and think carefully
about this things become very clear, simple and obvious. When this happens you
can finally realize what the future holds for our minds once we start effing,
expanding and sharing the conscious experience in our brains.
Once you realize all this you know how stupid it is to think things like the
Turing test will forever be the best tool we have to determine how conscious
another being is and so on. I wish people on this list, science fiction
writes, and people like Raymond Kurzweil and most everyone else would stop
being so foolish and irrational in this way.
Brent Allsop
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Feb 13 2003 - 16:54:11 MST