I don't know anything, including what's "real"

sengsational

sengsational

Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
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We humans, and I count myself as one, are pretty darned convinced that what we detect directly is "reality." We have all seen the visual illusions that make it clear we've got some bugs in our visual processing, but I just came across an audio illusion called a "Shepard Tone" which surprised me. I consider myself pretty good musically, and this illusion, even thought I know what's happening, I just can't hear past it! The audio illusion consists of a set of tones that increase over a few seconds and then the whole thing repeats, over and over. But while you're listening to it, it sounds like it's ever increasing, never "resetting" to a lower pitch. There's a bunch of examples on the web, but this one is at the top of my search results.

I just got done reading "The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth" by Donald Hoffman. He really pounds on this "Fitness Beats Truth" idea, where evolution, selecting for the ability to pass genes on is all-powerful and in ALL cases, beats "truth." We don't perceive what's "out there", we perceive what best allowed our genes to get to this point. In chapter 5 of Anika Harris' audio series "Lights On" (of which I've only heard an excerpt) they talk about other things like the Shepard Tone where we don't perceive reality accurately.

I find this stuff fascinating, but I can imagine that it takes a certain disposition to be interested in tearing down the facade. And no reason evolution would stop after the basic senses...it's really got to include thinking too. Maybe especially thinking.
 
Certainly, reality at the quantum level is just plain weird.
 
The one that gets me is the fake hand hit by a hammer test. Basically, a subject is given a fake hand and arm, which they view. Meanwhile, their real hand is behind a screen, out of view. The moderator "trains" the brain of the user by touching both hands. The subject can only see the fake hand touched. After a time, the subject thinks they feel sensation in the fake hand. The test ends with the moderator smashing the fake hand. The subjects report they feel the pain. But it never happened.

This is similar to what amputees feel in phantom pain.

There are a lot of videos of this experiment out there. Some longer than others. Here's a relatively short one:
 
I think it may all be just an illusion. That concept goes back at least to Plato and Buddha. But how could you ever tell?
 
Math and science have shown that nothing can be proved certain by referencing only itself (see the book Gödel, Escher, Bach). Instead, things have meaning only relative to other things. While our individual perceptions of reality might be unique to us, the majority of perceptions are about things multiple people can agree upon. For example, if we both see this forum, it is reasonable to agree it exists.

A single principle, Heisenberg Uncertainty, which I imagine as the universe's leaky memory chips, explains all quantum effects. That one concept accounts for all "quantum weirdness."
 
sengsational said:
In chapter 5 of Anika Harris' audio series "Lights On" (of which I've only heard an excerpt) they talk about other things like the Shepard Tone where we don't perceive reality accurately.
Click to expand...
Thanks for mentioning this Annaka Harris podcast. I'm a huge Sam Harris fan but didn't know Annaka (his wife) had gotten into podcasting herself. She wrote an interesting book about panpsychism: the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter (like electric charge, or gravity), as opposed to an emergent phenomenon that arises from complex information processing systems like brains, etc.
 
For me, reality is whatever I decide it is. Others can disagree with me, but they would just be wrong. That's fine; I've lived my entire life so far among many, many people who are wrong.
 
Regarding "Fitness Beats Truth," fitness is too broad to award it victory. For example, if superdeterminism is correct (not that I think it is), fitness genes have been determined by whatever came before them. Under superdeterminsim, there is no free will or genetic selection process, instead everything that happens has been predetermined by prior events.
 
I said "laurel" and the young wife listening from the other room said "yanny". But then I've always known that we inhabit different realities.
 
sengsational said:
We humans, and I count myself as one, are pretty darned convinced that what we detect directly is "reality." We have all seen the visual illusions that make it clear we've got some bugs in our visual processing, but I just came across an audio illusion called a "Shepard Tone" which surprised me. I consider myself pretty good musically, and this illusion, even thought I know what's happening, I just can't hear past it!
Click to expand...
You say," I thought I know what's happening" Oh, I thought I knew until, I looked on a spectrum analyzer. It is ten frequencies all rising in frequency. They are between 300Hz and 3500Hz. As the tone gets to about 2500 hz the amplitude starts dropping. At time there are one or two frequencies that have another frequency very close to it, and then they start to move away from each other in frequency, one rises faster than the other.
I use an Spectrum Analyzer app on my phone called 'Spectroid' From the google store, there are others, just the first I picked. I just changed the settings in Spectroid, From Log to linear, it allows a wider bandwidth, there is at least one other low level frequency just above 5kHz. Fun Stuff!
 
I look at it this way: We are born with a set of sensors to detect what's "out there" in the world around us. They are imperfect, and can be fooled in edge cases. But they give us a pretty decent interpretation of "reality" at the scale we live in.

We invent sensors to enhance those capabilities. With those, we can see deeper into "reality" and at scales beyond our day-to-day existence, in both directions. Some of those give us a better or more nuanced understanding of "reality." And in those edge cases where our native sensors trick us, our artificial sensors can set the record straight.

Does this mean "reality" doesn't exist, or that we're unable to see it? Not at all. We sense it imperfectly, but well enough to pass along our genes.
 
CaptTom said:
I look at it this way: We are born with a set of sensors to detect what's "out there" in the world around us. They are imperfect, and can be fooled in edge cases. But they give us a pretty decent interpretation of "reality" at the scale we live in.

We invent sensors to enhance those capabilities. With those, we can see deeper into "reality" and at scales beyond our day-to-day existence, in both directions. Some of those give us a better or more nuanced understanding of "reality." And in those edge cases where our native sensors trick us, our artificial sensors can set the record straight.

Does this mean "reality" doesn't exist, or that we're unable to see it? Not at all. We sense it imperfectly, but well enough to pass along our genes.
Click to expand...
Those senses were good enough to keep most of our ancestors from being eaten by a bear while finding a mate. The fact that we haven't adapted completely in a world changing so rapidly doesn't surprise me. Of course, most of us still don't get eaten by a bear and we do find a mate, so...
 
sengsational said:
... like the Shepard Tone where we don't perceive reality accurately. ...
Click to expand...
Interesting topic, I have not read the rest in detail, but I'll throw this into the mix for now:

The Shepard tone IS real. We perceive exactly what is going on. It's just a trick, it makes us focus on something - like a magician does.

It's actually pretty simple, and your description is pretty far off. It starts with a rising tone, very low frequency, and it fades in from nothing to full volume. A short time later, another rising tone just like it starts (fading in - this is important).

When each tone reaches a high frequency, it fades out. So you keep hearing rising tones, but they are fading in/out, so your focus is on the middle. You never catch the abrupt change and reset back to low.

I think there is a visual equivalent, soothing that appears to keep speeding up. Pretty wild.
 
Are you familiar with the Price equation? Perhaps a serendipitous article from Aeon could help flesh out what has changed in evolution since my youth. My familiarity was linguistic and ideas, not the mathematical approach. My knowledge stopped at Mendel on the math side. Beanbag genetics rules!

aeon.co

A resurrected defence of beanbag genetics | Aeon Essays

Today a bitter dispute about the nature of biology is underway. A simple bag of beans may be what tips the balance
aeon.co aeon.co

I was familiar with the basics: selection, drift, mutation and gene flow... except for the last one. I had never gotten to the mechanics of population genetics and its outcomes.

Meanwhile, they have added epigenetics and attached it to the other 4 parts of the Price equation. I think at 100 years this might actually be approaching "settled science" as the article states.


If you like the Shepard illusion, look for the optical image that triggers seizures in about a third of the folks who peer at it. There was a StarTrek episode that riffed on it, where they planted an algorithmic version of it on a Borg explorer ship and sent it back to the hive to destroy the collective.
 
Someone described life as "3 pounds of gelatinous cells encased in a dark soundless bone case running a simulation" Sounds reasonable.
 
I spent a month reviewing a compendium of visual artifacts and illusions. The kind of thing that might have been in Science News 30 years back.

They categorized them by the type of system being confused or tricked. Some illusions mess with the retina, others fool different processing centers. Feels like it is in the same ballpark as Shepard.
 
Also reminds me of my 90's reading, Physics as Language. It explored the use of concepts and narrative that precedes actual understanding. Picked at the language and concepts in quantum theory. Weinstein criticizes string theory in a similar manner.
 
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