Controlled Hallucinations

Let's dive right in to this, shall we?

Everything that we perceive, both consciously or unconsciously, is a construction of the brain. These perceptions are acts of interpretation. Try to imagine being a brain. You’re sealed inside the bony vault of the skull, trying to decipher what’s outside. It’s completely dark and totally silent, without light, sound, or anything at all. When it forms perceptions, all the brain has to go on is a constant barrage of electrical signals that are only indirectly related to things out in the world. These sensory inputs don’t come with labels attached (“I’m from an iPhone.”). They don’t even arrive with labels of whether they are visual or auditory or sensations of touch or temperature. The brain simply sends and receives electrical signals while being completely isolated from the outside world. 

Consider the following thought experiment of a moment.

Person A: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went around the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?”

Person B: “Because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.”

Person A: “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?”

This illustrates the point that how things seem is not necessarily how they are. Although it seems as though the sun goes around the earth, it is actually the earth rotating on its own axis that gives us night and day, and it is the sun, not the earth, that sits at the center of the solar system.

Perception is much the same. When you open your eyes, it seems as though there’s a real world out there. Objects appear to have specific shapes, textures and so on. This is how things seem. Although it may seem that your senses provide a direct and transparent view of a mind-independent reality, what’s really going on is quite different. Perceptions come primarily from the brain's best guesses about the cause of sensory signals. This means that what we experience is built from the inside out.

The brain constantly creates best guesses about the causes of sensory signals, even for simple things like looking at an iPhone. Sensory signals from the outside help refine these predictions by serving as "prediction errors," or differences between what the brain expects and what it gets. These signals are used to refine predictions about everything outside the brain. As a result, the brain's hypotheses are a close approximation to the causes of external stimuli.

Returning to the example of seeing your iPhone, we never experience the sensory signals themselves, we only experience indirect interpretations of them. It seems as though the world we see is being poured into our brain from the outside but what we actually perceive is our own outwardly projected fantasy being constantly restrained by whatever reality may be. In this view, which is often called  ‘predictive processing’, perception is a controlled hallucination, in which the brain’s hypotheses are continually reined in by sensory signals arriving from the external world. ‘A fantasy that coincides with reality,’ as the psychologist Chris Frith eloquently put it in Making Up the Mind (2007).

Instead of perception depending largely on signals coming into the brain from the outside world, it depends as much, if not more, on perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite direction. We don't just passively perceive the world. We actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in. In other words, people consciously see what they expect, rather than what violates their expectations.

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

—from Seduction of the Minotaur, by Anaïs Nin (1961)

One important item to consider is the role of attention in perception. Attention plays a crucial role in selecting which sensory inputs to prioritize and integrate into our perception. For example, when we are reading a book, we are selectively attending to the words on the page and filtering out irrelevant background noise. This means that our perception is not just a simple representation of the external world, but it is also influenced by our internal goals, expectations, and motivations.

Another important point to consider is the role of past experiences and learning in shaping perception. Our previous experiences and cultural background shape the way we interpret and make sense of the sensory inputs we receive. For instance, people from different cultures may perceive the same object or event differently due to their unique cultural norms and values.

It is important to acknowledge that perception is not just a product of the brain alone, but it is also shaped by the body and the environment. Our sensory organs and the physical environment in which we exist play a crucial role in shaping our perceptual experiences. For instance, the size and shape of our eyes and the characteristics of the light in the environment determine how we perceive color and brightness. Therefore, our perception is a complex and dynamic interplay between the brain, body, and environment.

Perception is a complex process that involves the brain's best guesses about the causes of sensory signals. When we open our eyes, it seems as though there's a real world out there, but in reality, what we experience is a construction of the brain. This means that our perceptions are acts of interpretation, rather than direct representations of the external world. Instead of perception depending largely on signals coming into the brain from the outside world, it depends as much, if not more, on perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite direction. We don't just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it.

Even something as basic as color is not passively received from the world, but are created from different wavelengths of colorless electromagnetic radiation. This means that colors are not objective properties of objects in the world. Instead, the brain and visual system make inferences based on wavelengths of light to determine perceived colors. Therefore, something as basic as color is not passively received from the world.

We only experience a small slice of the data that is coming in, processing no information above the ultraviolet or below infrared. Just that is enough to see that perceptual experience cannot possibly be a comprehensive or direct representation of the universe that is external to the brain. The reality we experience, the way things seem, is a clever construction by the brain. The fact remains that since the sum of your experiences and memories are unique to yourself and used to actively generate your perspective, it follows that your brain's controlled hallucinations are different than mine and therefore your reality is different than my reality.