Comment by namanyayg
10 hours ago
This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness.
We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter.
This is one of the core tenets of Buddhism, and it's also expounded on Greg Egan's short novel "Learning to Be Me". He's one of my favorite sci-fi authors and this particular short led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading many of his works within a few months.
I found a copy online, if you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and check it out. You won't be able to put it down and the ending is sublime. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1995-egan.pdf
I'm not sure this is unique to consciousness (whatever that is). What would it even mean to directly interact with the physical world? Even the most precise scientific experiments are a series of indirect measurements of something that perhaps in some sense is fundamentally unknowable.
“ This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness. We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter.”
This is an orthodox position in modern philosophy, dating back to at least Locke, strengthened by Kant and Schopenhauer. It’s held up to scrutiny for the past ~400 years.
But really it’s there in Plato too, so 2300+ years. And maybe further back
It’s the Allegory of the Cave, isn’t it?
Afaik, there's a difference between classical philosophy (which opines on the divide between an objective world and the perceived word) and more modern philosophy (which generally does away with that distinction while expanding on the idea that human perception can be fallible).
The idea that there's an objective but imperceivable world (except by philosophers) is... a slippery slope to philosophical excess.
It's easy to spin whatever fancy you want when nobody can falsify it.
This is absolutely what happens. It's even more tricky since our sensory inputs have different latencies which the brain must compile back into something consistent. While doing so it interprets and filters out a lot of unsurprising, expected data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8
Thank you for linking this! I'm a big fan of Egan but had never read this particular short story. I feel like Egan is perhaps the only contemporary author who actually _gets_ consciousness.