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Emily Alspector's picture

Seeing is believing…

 

First of all, Im really glad no one used that catchy title before I got to! Second, I’ll get to my actual point. Although I was unaware of the “faking” that our nervous system pulls in order to allow us to not see “holes” (whatever those might look like), I don’t think this means that the nervous system is tricking us or is misrepresenting “reality”. What is reality anyway? And does it have to equate with what is “real”? I think we established the fact that because our senses only sense so much, what our brain translates that into is only a proportion of what is “reality” outside of our senses. It seems that “real” is what we make of it, and reality is something we just simply don’t have access to. While this is all really interesting and sort of creepy, I’m not sure I see the relevance to consciousness. A few people mentioned daydreaming, imaginary friends, etcetc, all these things we see, or imagine, when we want to. Similar fill-in-the-blank studies have shown that our brains will use contextual situations in order to help our cognition so we don’t overload on trying to figure out everything for what it truly is. This seems vague, but that’s only because I can’t recall the actual studies. I learned about them in Memory & Cognition with Professor Boltz at Haverford. What I can remember, though, from that class is pretty much a whole semester of mind tricks where the brain “makes things up” so you don’t have to. For example, if a sound is deleted from a word, and the participant hears “I slammed on my b__akes”, the brain won’t even realize that the R was deleted from the recording because it fills it in for you. So this brain trickery occurs in lots of different domains of function. Again, I’m not sure the relevance of this to our consciousness debate. This seems like something that is a constructive adaptation of our brains, and it occurs without our I-function being aware of it.  

Another train of thought I had during class on Tuesday was the idea of borders and edges, and I don’t know who else has seen the move I Heart Huckabees but there is a really great quote that is somewhat relevant and just kinda cool to think about: “If you look close enough you can't tell where my nose ends and space begins.” Just something to think about…is this statement true, based on what we discussed in class?

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