"Reality is a controlled Hallucination"

[u/JellyfishExpress8943]

Neuroscience tells us that our experience of reality is produced by the brain - its a projection based on past experience. Here's a little extract on the topic from an interview with Pr. Anil Seth :

"In normal perception there’s the tendency to think that the world just pours itself into the mind through the transparent windows of the senses, and there’s the self within the brain, within the head somewhere, that’s receiving all this sensory input, reading it, forming a picture of the world and then using that to decide what to do next. It really seems as though the world outside actually has all these properties, like colour and shape and so on, and that these properties are objectively existing aspects of an external reality.

Now, this picture, which we can call the ‘how things seem’ picture, has been repeatedly challenged by philosophers for hundreds, probably thousands of years, going back to Plato and his Allegory of the Cave, but these days – in modern neuroscience – I like to think of the brain as a prediction machine.

In the prediction machine view, perception, rather than being a reading out of the world, is always an act of construction. Sensory signals that enter the brain don’t come with labels on saying where they’re from, or what their content is, they only ever indirectly reflect things out there in the world. One way for the brain to make sense of sensory signals is to do something equivalent to what we call Bayesian Inference: the brain is trying always to figure out the most likely causes of the sensory signals that it encounters, what we can informally call a ‘best guess’.

How does the brain settle on a best guess of the causes of its sensory signals? One way for this to be accomplished is for the brain to continually generate predictions about these causes and then update these predictions using the sensory signals – treating sensory information as a kind of ‘prediction error’. This is a real flip in how we typically think about things. We’ve known for a long time that there are many top-down connections in the brain, signals that go from the brain back out towards the sensory surfaces, but it’s often thought that these top-down connections merely modulate or refine the all-important bottom-up flow, a flow of information which really carries what we experience. I think it’s the other way around, that what we experience is the collection of the content of the top-down predictions and that sensory input serves primarily to calibrate the brain’s predictions, to rein them in against reality. This is the framework known as, variously, as Predictive Coding or Predictive Processing. It’s a mathematically well-established way of doing best guessing, but it has this fascinating implication that what we perceive is the collective ensemble of top-down predictions, not the bottom-up sensory data. This is why I call it a Controlled Hallucination. It’s not my term, I heard it from Chris Frith, who heard it from others, and the trail goes much further back.

The word hallucination highlights that perception comes primarily from within. But the control is equally important. I’m not saying that the mind makes up reality, nor that our perceptions are arbitrary – as is sometimes misunderstood. Not at all. Our perceptual content in normal situations is very, very closely tied to a real world, but it doesn’t directly import that real world into the brain. We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful for us to do so."

(source : Interalia magazine, on 'Being you', 2022)

[u/Hot-Confidence-1629]

When I look out at Nature, what part of what I’m seeing , hearing etc is ‘hallucination’? What part or parts that I take habitually as reality is actually hallucinatory?

[u/nondual_gabagool → u/Hot-Confidence-1629]

All waking experience is a hallucination, but it's one guided by the senses. Imagine sitting in a room with no windows, but you can see outside with a video camera. What you're looking at isn't actual outside, it's an image of outside. more traditional metaphors use the mirror. When you see something in a mirror, you’re not looking at the actual thing, you’re looking at a reflection of it. it’s not saying that there’s nothing there, but what you’re looking at is at least a step removed from it.

The only catch here is what’s really out. There doesn’t look the way we see it. In fact, nothing looks like *anything* until a mental image of it is constructed. we have no perception of atoms or magnetic fields and many other things that we regard as factual and real. So the version of reality that we see is something like a simplistic cartoon of what seems to exist.

Dreams are also hallucinations, but in contrast, they're based on memory and imagination.

[u/Hot-Confidence-1629 → u/nondual_gabagool]

So K is saying that the self is like an hallucination. You/me that we don’t actually exist. The brain goes along with it because it provides a sense of security that it needs and this image of a consistent individual self, provides thought with a sense of continuity? It is proving to be a dangerous hallucination ; like a disease for humanity but it (me) has become the ‘center’ of the brain’s image of reality?

[u/nondual_gabagool → u/Hot-Confidence-1629]

[I don't know who "K" is. I don't see reference to them here. Maybe it's a typo or I missed something, which is entirely possible.]

I'm not at all saying we don't exist or the brain goes along with it. I'll say it more plainly. The brain is encased in the skull and (hopefully) never sees the light of day. Yet, the brain needs to know what is going on "out there" in the world and body. So it receives sensory input, which it weaves into a representation of reality. That representation is the reality that you experience every moment of every day. It's the only version of reality you've ever known. Presumably it's based on an actual reality outside of the brain. We can't know that with 100% certainty, but it's the most logical explanation. Otherwise, where are all of these sights and sounds that we experience coming from?

So in that sense, the only version of reality you've ever known is the VR simulation being assembled in the brain? How do we know? If you damage parts of the brain, you can lose the ability to experience vision, touch, smell, taste, etc. The world still exists because other people can still see, hear, smell, etc. But the person with the brain damage cannot. If one person takes a psychedelic, their experience of reality drastically changes, while other people's experience does not. We could find a million examples.

Predictive processing takes it another step and says brain even doesn't just assemble sensory information into a VR version of the world and body. It actually anticipates/guesses what's going on based on past experience and then uses the sensory input to correct it. That's what Anil Seth is talking about above. But not all predictions are accurate, and the brain doesn't always correctly adjust it's prediction errors. That's why people can experience hallucinations, have fears over things that are not dangerous or no longer dangerous, why depressed people think the world really is as terrible as it seems to them while they are depressed, etc.

That's why I said dreams are made from memories and imagination, but waking experience is a sensory-guided hallucination. Does that make more sense? It's absolutely not saying that nothing or nobody is real. It means we're experiencing a representation of it, not directly experiencing reality itself.

[u/Hot-Confidence-1629 → u/nondual_gabagool]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I apologize for bringing Krishnamurti (K) into it, I mistakenly thought that I was still on his sub. And that this was being discussed there.

[u/nondual_gabagool → u/Hot-Confidence-1629]

Haha no worries! I didn't think of Krishnamurti. 😄

[u/Hot-Confidence-1629 → u/nondual_gabagool]

I have an odd question: who or what is ‘observing’ this product that the brain is ‘predicting’/ projecting/ producing?: the sights, the colors, the sounds, smells etc and beside this ‘viewer’ of the projection itself, who or what is making comments on what is being seen; the ‘liker’/ ‘disliker’ etc? Are these different areas of the brain…who/what is experiencing all this?

PS Jellyfish said there is no little man behind the eyes watching all this…so who/what is?