Current Events > consciousness is an enormous shared hallucination called reality

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/ted-day-three-mind-scrambling-ted-talk-wont-stop-sharing/?mbid=nl_42717_p3&CNDID=31302316

There are two sides to consciousness, Seth says: the outside experience and the inner experience. Starting with the outside—the sights, sounds and smells surrounding us—Seth says our experience depends on our brain’s ability to function as a prediction engine. He played a garbled audio clip for the audience, something indiscernible—then a clearer version of the clip. “I think Brexit is a really terrible idea,” the recording said. He then played the same earlier, garbled audio. This time, it was completely intelligible.

“The sensory information coming into your brain hasn’t changed at all,” Seth said. But something had changed after we heard the clearer audio. Our brains had information to predict what the garbled audio would sound like. Judging from the faces of the people around me, I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling amazed. (Gobsmacking audience participation? Check.)

My heart was engaged. Then came my head. “If hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception, then perception is a kind of hallucination,” Seth said. But, he said, it’s a controlled hallucination, one in which sensory information from the world is reining in the brain’s predictions. “In fact, we’re hallucinating all the time, including right now. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations. We call that reality.” Dang.
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what sort of drugs did this guy take before doing this talk and where can I get them
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chill02 posted...

what sort of drugs did this guy take before doing this talk and where can I get them

2deep
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Soo much rock
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Yep.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUIcCyPOA30
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Bump
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Consciousness is a bullshit question. It's the 'hard problem' because people are chasing a problem that doesn't exist.
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COVxy posted...

Consciousness is a bullshit question. It's the 'hard problem' because people are chasing a problem that doesn't exist.

Y?
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I imagine if there were a drug (there probably is) that made you take in all sensory information without any bias, reality wouldn't be much different.
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E32005 posted...

COVxy posted...

Consciousness is a bullshit question. It's the 'hard problem' because people are chasing a problem that doesn't exist.

Y?

Because the entire reason consciousness has been studied is due to an elevation of subjective experience as profound. Your moment by moment experiences, the feeling of you-ness, are so profound that we must think of them as otherworldly.

We study "consciousness" everyday in cognitive neuroscience labs. However, these studies are denied by people interested in consciousness for the very reason that they are physical, rather than metaphysical. If I can explain the processing and consolidation of long term memory through analysis of hippocampal circuitry, that can't be an explanation of conscious experience because it's too mundane. It's not profound enough.
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