Controlled hallucination

2022-02-26 22:22

Perception can be understood as top-down or bottom-up.

Take a cup for example.

Bottom up holds that you see a cup or feel a cup and your sensors tell your brian that there is a cup.

Top down is like Plato's cave. The shadows are given names by the people inside the cave because they are what is 'real'. The world is conjoured by our brain.

There is a middle ground - which results in the theory of controlled hallucination.

This holds that the brain is constantly making predictions about the sensory signals it is receiving and making sense of them. The brian constantly compares the errors it makes in its predictions. It then makes iterative predictions based on the signals it does receive.

Therefore we never actually experience senses - we only experience them filtered through our perception.

An example of this in action is when you look at a piece of paper inside, and then look at it outside. It looks like the same colour of white even though the signals received by our visual cortexes will be very different based on the light.