A Sense of Free Will: the consciousness quagmire (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, September 07, 2015, 13:28 (3365 days ago) @ David Turell


> > > > Romansh: Do you actually think our eye movements are independent of cause? -> > > David: No, they are caused by the brain as built-in mechanisms to help us see reality properly. The brain is not a digital camera. What caused the brain to develop this ability is the underlying discussion of this website.-Vision tricks used by the brain to help us understand reality:-http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43036/title/Seeing-Isn-t-Believing/- I study visual illusions of motion because seeing the errors that a system makes can help us to understand how that system works normally. Visual perception goes far beyond our retinal images, which provide only partial sensory information. We use our knowledge and expectations of the world to fill in the gaps, for instance, when an object is partly hidden. Ambiguous illusions that can be interpreted in two different ways, but not both ways at the same time, can also shed light on how we perceive the world around us.-***-In sum, illusions teach us that perception goes far beyond the information picked up by our senses. Perception is an indirect, interpretive top-down process that is not driven simply by stimulus patterns, but is instead a dynamic, active search for the best interpretation of the available sensory data.