#PersonalFave: "Do We See Reality As It Is?" The Most Mind-Blowing TED Talk I've Seen
Like many on Steemit, I have seen my fair share of Ted Talks. In fact, I have seen so many that I got just plain sick of them! But I recently saw the following video found it to be one of the best, if not the best I'd ever seen. In it he talks about the fact that the human sensory apparatus evolved to in order to maximize our odds of reproducing, not to give us an accurate representation of the world.
"When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a brain or neurons I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a brain or neurons and is nothing like a brain or neurons. And that reality is the real source of cause and effect in the world. Not brains. Not neurons. Brains and neurons have no causal powers. They cause none of our perceptual experiences and none of our behavior. Brains and neurons are a species-specific set of symbols ...
Perhaps reality is some vast interacting network of conscious agents simple and complex that cause each others conscious experiences ...
But here's the point. Once we let go of our massively intuitive, but massively false assumption about the nature of reality it opens up new ways to think about life's greatest mystery. I bet that reality will end up turning out to be more fascinating and unexpected than we ever imagined."
Wow, that is indeed an amazing talk. Definitely worth the time.
I especially liked the computer interface metaphor:
Yeah me too! Such a simple argument, but so powerful.
This metaphor can also shed some light on the way how we perceive "mental disorders".
The current approach: Your illness causes you to make up a reality which does not exist. Those voices that you hear and images that you see are not real, they are only illusions in your head.
A new approach: Your interface chooses to display and interpret reality in a non-standard way. And it's non-standard only here, on this planet, and only among a species called homo sapiens. It might be the case that your interface renders reality more accurately than the rest of your species .
Isn't it interesting that the human mind which is itself along with the 5 senses a set of tools that form an interface to reality created the computer the way it did with tools that form an interface to the data we work with everyday?
Now imagine if we could theme our reality.
I think we can