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Sunday, September 25, 2011
The Brain Imaging Videos: A Beginning Interpretation
This is the most telling video for me. It shows how similar the three fMRI subjects' imagery was. What this says to me is that phenomenology is right on the money. You don't see a lot of little dots that you resolve into Steve Martin or a parrot. Steve Martin and the parrot are right there, as themselves, whole. It also implies that your mind is “out there” not in some little isolated box. It's out there in an interobjective space translating Steve Martin and the parrot into a parody of themselves. Not pure abstraction.
Looking at the images are “sprouts of enjoyment” emerging from the brain—the other way around, that is—they uncannily resemble the mimoids produced by the sentient ocean Solaris.
Think of visual perception as real-time simulation in neural wetware of the external world driven by sensory input. Remember that the brain is actively predicting what's coming next. It's expecting certain input. That's the simulation aspect. It then, in effect, uses sensory input to calibrate and refine its prediction.
ReplyDeleteMy quick take on this work:
ReplyDeletehttp://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/09/seeing-into-brain.html