“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


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. 

2 comments:

Bill Benzon said...

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.

Bill Benzon said...

My quick take on this work:

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/09/seeing-into-brain.html