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jlhawnyesterday at 9:48 PM5 repliesview on HN

Now I can't stop thinking about _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. It theorizes that this is how humans navigate and experience the real world: Our brains generate what we think the world around is like and our senses don't so much directly process visual information but instead act like a kind of loss function for our internal simulations. Then we use that error to update our internal model of the world.

In this view, we are essentially living inside a high-fidelity generative model. Our brains are constantly 'hallucinating' a predicted reality based on past experience and current goals. The data from our senses isn't the source of the image; it's the error signal used to calibrate that internal model. Much like Genie 3 uses latent actions and frames to predict the next state of a world, our brains use 'Active Inference' to minimize the gap between what we expect and what we experience.

It suggests that our sense of 'reality' isn't a direct recording of the world, but a highly optimized, interactive simulation that is continuously 'regularized' by the photons hitting our retinas.


Replies

tracerbulletxyesterday at 11:15 PM

I think this is pretty well established as far as neurologists are concerned and explains a lot of things. Like dreaming for instance.. just something like the model running without sensory input constraining it.

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shagieyesterday at 10:30 PM

A kurzgesagt on this: Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day https://youtu.be/wo_e0EvEZn8 and the sources for that video - https://sites.google.com/view/sources-reality-is-not-real/

psychoslaveyesterday at 11:33 PM

Like, "Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality" as exposed by Anil Seth[1]? Found that one while searching for something like "the illusion of the self" a few years ago.

It’s also easy to find this treated in various philosophy/religion through time and space. And anyway as consciousness is eager to project whatever looks like a possible fit, elements of suggesting prior arts can be inferred back as far as traces can be found.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo

cfiggersyesterday at 11:11 PM

Another analogy that kinda fits in with what you're saying is the post-processing on smartphone "photos."

At what point does the processing become so strong that it's less a photograph and more a work of computational impressionism?

alastairyesterday at 11:18 PM

Also check out The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman