Reality is a shared hallucination

[Peron]

A interesting paper I read and decided to share with you. (Had no idea where to post it.)

 

A central rule of large-scale organization goes like this: the greater the spryness of a massive enterprise, the more internal communication it takes to support the teamwork of the parts. For example, in all but the simplest plants and animals only 5% of DNA is dedicated to DNA's "real job," manufacturing proteins. The remaining 95% is preoccupied with organization and administration, supervising the maintenance of bodily procedures, or even merely interpreting the corporate rule book "printed" in a string of genes.

 

In an effective learning machine, the connections between internal elements far outnumber windows to the outside world. Take the cerebral cortex, roughly 80% of whose nerves connect with each other, not with sensory input from the eyes or ears. No wonder in human society individuals spend most of their time communicating with each other, not exploring beasts and plants which could make an untraditional dish. This cabling for "bureaucratic maintenance" has a far greater impact on what we "see" and "hear" than most psychological researchers suspect. For it puts us in the hands of a conformity enforcer whose power and subtlety are almost beyond belief.

 

In our previous episode we mentioned that the brain's emotional center — the limbic system — decides which swatches of experience to "notice" and store in memory. Memory is the core of what we call reality. Think about it for a second. What do you actually hear and see right now? This article. The walls and furnishings of the room in which you sit. Perhaps some music or some background noise. Yet you know sure as you were born that there's a broader world outside those walls. You are certain that your home, if you are away from it, is still there. You can sense each room, remember where most of your things are placed. You know the building where you work — its colors, layout, and the feel of it. Then there are the companions who enrich your life — family, the folks at the office, neighbors, friends, and even people you are fond of whom you haven't talked to in a year or more — few of whom, if any, are in the room with you. You also know we sit on a planet called the earth, circling an incandescent ball of sun, buried in one of many galaxies. At this instant, reading by yourself, where do these realities reside? Inside your mind. Memory in a very real sense is reality. What the limbic system decides to "see" and store away becomes an interior universe pretending to stretch so far outside that it can brush the edges of infinity.

 

No wonder input from the herd so strongly colors the ways in which we see our world. Students at MIT were given a bio of a guest lecturer. One group's background sheet described the speaker as cold, the other group's handout praised him for his warmth. Both groups sat together as they watched the lecturer give his presentation. But those who'd read the bio saying he was cold treated him as distant and aloof. Those who'd been tipped off that he was warm, rated him as friendly and approachable. In judging a fellow human being, students replaced external fact with input they'd been given socially.

 

Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. The strangest come from choruses of the dead — cultural predecessors whose legacy has a dramatic effect on our vision of reality. Take the impact of gender stereotypes — notions developed over hundreds of generations, contributed to, embellished and passed on by literally billions of people during the long human march through time.

 

Humans basically live in bubbles of illusion.

[the tree]

Yeah, generally if your going to cite an article then you should give a source. Who wrote this and what journal does it come from?

 

The theory-ladenness of observation is a very interesting and very real problem, which the case of the guest lecturer is not a bad example but without any assurance that the study was not completely made up, it's not a useful one, at all.

[Peron]

Opps sorry, http://reactor-core.org/reality-hallucination.html