TED
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2023
23:46 · 1.8M views · May 3, 2007
Philosopher Dan Dennett argues in a TED talk that we do not understand our own consciousness and that our brains often fool us. He uses perceptual examples, including a painting that invites the viewer to fill in detail.
HN recommends it as a short route to Dennett's view of consciousness as a bag of tricks, often in AI and cognition threads.
4 comments from Hacker News
it's not just that phenomenon. Daniel Dennett mentions an experience where a painting , with very little detail up-close, appeared to him to have all the detail of a photograph when viewed from afar[0]. It's not quite the same thing as the uncanny valley effect, for him it came about from his naive expectation of up-close detail being blown apart by his experience, when getting closer and closer to the painting, of realizing that the painting itself was almost incomprehensible up-close -- the detail was created by the way the abstract shapes created the illusion of detail from afar on a very large canvas. It was sort of an artistic physical version of rendering LOD tricks. He expresses it much better than I do, I recommend the TED talk or the Google talk where he highlights this example as a way to gain insight into what consciousness may be. [0]: this video
One can equally say, "Human brains only know that a neuron is activated by a pattern of axon firing in response to physical inputs from nerve endings." Does any of that change anything? Not really. >It doesn't understand credit card rewards Is this assertion based on anything but philosophical bias surrounding the word "understand"? >it understands how to compose an elementary word problem into algebra That's exactly how a human, who may or may not have understood rewards programs beforehand, would solve that word problem. Dan Dennett is informative here.[0] Yes, consciousness (even your own!) can just be a bag of tricks. [0] this video
This is something the philosopher Daniel Dennett has written about at length. The nature of our consciousness is not as it appears. (Here's his TED talk [0].) As you say, blinking rarely makes its way into conscious thought, despite that the visual input was briefly suspended. (I suppose a similar thing happens with smell. How often do you notice that you don't smell much when you breathe out?) Neither do we notice that our various senses have different latencies, reporting the same event at different times. As I understand it, the blind spot in our vision was only discovered relatively recently. For countless millennia, mankind wasn't even aware of it, and not for lack of curiosity. I suspect the same goes for our colour perception. Senses can even blur together - the input from, say, your sight, can affect how you perceive taste, or texture. As you say, this kind of 'smearing' is a brilliant feature of our minds, it's not an ugly hack at all. That we aren't able to intuit the precise nature of how we perceive things, is a small price to pay, both in evolutionary terms and in terms of the elegance of the system, to my mind. On a less substantive note: reading lengthy writeups on Twitter is singularly painful. I do wish people would make the leap to the blog-post format for this kind of thing. [0] this video
This view of art, where the spectator is active participant and generalizes from incomplete information, reminds of the painting that Dan Dennett loves to talk about: this video