Anil Seth on why our senses are fine-tuned for utility, not for 'reality'
vimeo.com/436178171
https://aeon.co/videos/anil-seth-on-why-our-senses-are-fine-tuned-for-utility-not-for-reality
Its easy to mistake our conscious experience for an ongoing, accurate account of reality. After all, the information we recover from our senses is, of course, the only window well ever have into the outside world. And for most people most of the time, our perception certainly
feels real. But the notion that our senses capture an objective external reality can be dispelled by considering something as fundamental as colour, which can be
culturally influenced and, even within a single culture, leave the population split between seeing the same picture of a dress as black-and-blue or white-and-gold.
In this instalment from Aeons
In Sight series, Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the UK, puts our imperfect relationship with reality in perspective. In conversation with Nigel Warburton, consultant senior editor at Aeon+Psyche, Seth argues that its not just that our perceptions provide flawed accounts of the outside world, but that our brains arent in the business of recovering the outside world to begin with. So its more accurate to think of our conscious experience as a series of predictions that were incessantly and subconsciously fine-tuning a world we build from the inside out, rather than the outside in.
For more from Anil Seth, read his Aeon
essay on the hard problem of consciousness.