Which is why I make the point of identifying that as our Human Mindscape (all that unfolds within our mind, just beyond the brain/body) and mind is definitely qualitatively significantly different from the physical realm our bodies inhabit.
This is exactly the point I keep hammering away at. Our minds create our impressions of reality!
Key point being that the reality we are perceiving is there, independent of our perception of it.
How we perceive that world is a different matter.
We do the best we can with what we have.
Seth speciality is the way the human mind works.
That’s fine, but a truly deeper understanding requires us to pull back from the cozy creative, but oh so self-centered anthropomorphizing as though we were God’s own unique animals, and start to look at us in context with the rest of Earth’s evolving animal kingdom.
First listening to and now reading Ed Yong’s * An Immense World - How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us I’ve realized how enlightening a better appreciation for the mind/body problem of other animals is for informing this entire debate. It especially helps put the “hallucination” trope into a much more realistic context.
I do intend on reporting back on the book’s highlights at that thread I started, but life gets busy, particular April, with gardening duties kicking in and my big Bluegrass Meltdown* weekend coming up in a couple days, so it’s on the back-burner for now. * Over ten years now, but this is the last one, time to retire and hand it on to a younger person. In some ways I’ll miss it, but then again I won’t, it’s a hell of a lot of work and I’m getting lazier all the time as my meter keeps getting closer to 70.
Write, it’s occurred to me why I find the “hallucination” metaphor so deeply offensive, or at least another way to try to explain it.
Our body’s perception is the result of countless calculations, coming in from well honed and proven sensing instruments to our brain, they get checked and double checked through various calculations, in real time, with a constant flow of feedback that weighs the calculations, that become action potentials, that trigger decisions, action. Nothing about that process or the results has anything to do with hallucination. It’s worth thinking about and understanding.
I know this isn’t what Seth is doing, it’s his sloppy lazy wordsmanship that mislead people into misplaced assumptions. Any deeper serious reading of Seth’s work gets into more nuances, so it’s not like I dismiss him, (the guy is not one of the posers sucking off the work of others). He has put in the work and earned his success and made a difference, I don’t dismiss any of that.
It’s one small, but significant detail, a communication thing, but one worth making an issue out of.
Back to, I know Seth isn’t doing this, but his words make it easy to imply that algorithms and calculations based on inputs of facts are hallucinations.
Why is it a hallucination?
Because those calculations contain errors and reductions and simplifications? Can you explain the rationale of that line of thinking?
I’ve tried to highlight the two realms of reality. These have been recognized on a visceral level probably since humans first became introspective and aware of the world and time. Who am I?
- Our thoughts. Our mind in action, the Mindscape.
- The physical stuff of matter and physics in action.
Seth’s analogy works for mind to mind interactions, that is social human intellectual intercourse. People to people mingling of our stories and thoughts and dreams and gossip that we exist within.
But it does not work for the human biological creature that’s producing this mind (& all we know). Our body’s interactions with the outside world and its own homeostasis, that is what has nothing to do with hallucination and that we need to understand a lot better than most do.
We are biological sensing creatures, analogous to all the other creatures that roam this planet. The product of Earth’s evolutionary processes. Once we internalize that, all sorts of things make more sense.
I believe strongly that this distinction needs to be acknowledged, processed, internalized, especially for those who intend to be around after the coming climate calamities play out.