Reply to comment

Like most everyone else in class I was fascinated by the idea of our brain filling in the gaps that the information on the retina cannot supply with something created exclusively by the brain. I’ve read about experiments where people were shown a room and told that it was an office. Afterwards, during a recall session, most of them reported seeing books in it…even though there actually were no books present.  The brain’s ability to create something out of nothing…to process patterns and fill in gaps…this is a truly amazing thing. This phenomenon seems to be completely independent of the I-function. Even when I consciously realize that in a second that dot will disappear and that there ought to be nothing there, a black hole…still I continue to see the paper that doesn’t actually exist. Where then is my I-function? I am not consciously creating that paper…or the extra red dot instead of a yellow one. It follows then that the process is a function of the brain not related in anyway to the I-function. We’ve talked so much about it and now it seems that after all the nervous system really does not have a conductor. It seems that the I-function either has no control over our perception and the various parts of the brain that create the patterns we think we see, or, which is still more disturbing, that it perhaps doesn’t exist at all.   

On another note, it occurred to me that if it’s perfectly normal for the brain to create what it thinks it ought to be seeing then where do we draw the line between sanity and insanity? Why is it normal to see a dot where no dot actually exists and not normal to have hallucinations or visions. Are hallucinations just the products of the brain filling in the gaps? You see an eerie light and you hear an odd noise and your brain leaps to the conclusion that you have witnessed the arrival of an extra terrestrial being.