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Reddit mentions of Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See

Sentiment score: 3
Reddit mentions: 5

We found 5 Reddit mentions of Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. Here are the top ones.

Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See
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ColorWhite
Height9.3 Inches
Length6.2 Inches
Number of items1
Release dateFebruary 2000
Weight1.35363828868 Pounds
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Found 5 comments on Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See:

u/ilahvlucy · 5 pointsr/witchcraft

I definitely think in these terms. In fact, my favorite explanation of magic in Doctor Strange was this same notion of programming experience. A book you might enjoy regarding the nature of experience is called Visual Intelligence by Donald Hoffman (linked below) which is about how the brain constructs reality according to rules, not facts. There's also a few good interviews with him on this subject (also linked below).

I find myself circling around a couple of ideas about magic from the standpoint of being locked in my brain in a programmed universe. The first is that I can learn to operate outside of my brain ( instead of relying on my input sensory devices like eyes/ears etc) and work perhaps astrally or I can put a lot of hard work into inferring what the rules of experience are and looking for the source code while only having access to the gui, so to speak.

In any case, I can't figure out where the basis for ritual fits in here. I could actually go on and on with this subject. I kind of have this notion (very rough) that I wish I could work on with others, that cultures around the world were given keys of knowledge and a basic truth and when combined, they form a complete practice of sorts. The Magicians sort of touched on this in the books regarding the Five Tertiary Circumstances, that to correctly execute a spell you had to know the phase of the moon, nearest body of water etc. But I would venture to say that my list of Circumstances would be more like: Astronomical position, local mineral composition, state of your inner energy channels, correct use of mudras (or similar channeling tool) etc.

I haven't learned a lot about sigils but I am interested in them after reading how they work for you.

https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Intelligence-How-Create-What/dp/0393319679/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=5PQZVRDXP99B4MXR4D9T

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

u/accretion · 2 pointsr/videos

And it's not even just color, it's everything. Everything we see is first filtered, interpreted, and processed by our brain. Our eyes only really see a small circle right directly where we look. Our brain constructs the remainder, puts it together, and keeps it coherent. Assuming it's working correctly of course.

There is a really great book called Visual Intellegence: How We Create What We See by Donald Hoffman that explains a lot of how our brain processes what we see. There are also many stories in the book of people who had brain trauma, or who had been born with brain differences, that caused strange visual problems. One I remember was a woman who could only see in snapshots, or stopmotion. Only one frame a second or so.

u/homo_erraticus · 2 pointsr/DebateReligion

Rambling musings it is!

All perception is hallucination, not in the sense that it has no grounding in sensory input, but in that it is a creation of the brain (I visited this in the last paragraph of my 4th response). To illustrate this, my favorite is Adelson's illusion – something that you simply cannot experience as it truly is, precisely because your brain creates the image incorrectly (in 3D, for one thing). The dots are the same color, as are the squares beneath them, but you cannot see that – even though you can prove it to be true. For a better, and more amusing exploration of this, watch the first 7-8 minutes of this presentation by Donald Hoffman. Continue to around the 15 minute mark to get his user interface theory of perception and finish the video to hear his theory of consciousness. Now, I've followed Hoffman for a long time, but I don't buy his grand theory. Still, I do appreciate the rigor of his approach (you can find other videos that dig deeper into the mathematics), and he's always had a good handle on visual perception – his book, Visual Intelligence is a delightful read.

What's the alternative to claiming that the brain creates the illusion of an experiencer? Are we to assume there actually is an experiencer? If so, how does that experiencer experience? Such an assumption just leads us to an infinite regress.

Be very careful about extrapolating function from the functional impact of damage to specific brain regions. There is a distinct difference between being involved in a function and being 'responsible' for that function. We also know that certain drugs can send consciousness on a holiday – general anesthesia comes to mind. Hell, we bid it a good night when we go to sleep.

When you understand what Rama stated in that video, you will understand what I am stating, because they are almost identical.

You're missing the point of the narrative. Creating a narrative for cleaning out the chicken coup is no different from the Capgras patient who rationalizes that the man who looks exactly like his father is an impostor because he doesn't get that feeling when he sees him. The linguistic mind is trying to make sense of the situation and creates the most reasonable story it can. That narrative defines who we are.

Eh, I think Jill is somewhat 'out there' – led by a priori beliefs to reify this 'soul' from the experience created by the brain – a damaged brain (changed hardware brought about a change of experience, by the way). She does, however, get a number of things correct in her talk. I agree with her general assessment of the right hemisphere as being about nothing more than now (although that now is actually a little in the past). It is in the richly linguistic hemisphere on the left side that we have a past and a future – that narrative (some might call it a soul).

I don't mean to imply that's what consciousness is, although I don't think there actually is such a thing. I think it's as Rama described – consciousness is an emergent property of interacting neural modules. It's not located anywhere in the brain, nor is it some mystical thing occupying the body – it's not a thing, at all, but our symbolic brains find that assumption hard not to make. It's just an illusion created by recursive symbolic representation – experience and its integration with the narrative.

It's clear that I need to make another point more clear. It is impossible to describe an experience, and nobody ever does it. We describe our memory of our experiences. That's all it is possible to do. This is a point I've tried to make less directly, but I think it needs to be asserted, with emphasis! This yanks us right back to that pesky narrative and the obvious reason why the 'unity' you mention isn't fractured in the cases thus explored, but I'm certain that you are aware of schizophrenia (at its root, probably a problem with time perception) and multiple personality disorder (multiple narratives), which do fracture that sense of unity.

There are also cases in which stroke patients will state that a paralyzed arm isn't actually hers, but belongs to her sister. There are cases in which a patient will desire an amputation at a precise location of a limb because, he will say, it doesn't belong. There's even Cotard's syndrome, in which the afflicted individual will believe himself to be dead. In every case, something has gone wrong with the underlying hardware of the brain.

So, getting back to my point about what we actually describe, Jill's left hemisphere has created a story about her experience. It's part of the narrative of Jill Taylor, but it isn't the experience. It's her memory of the experience or, more accurately, it's her current memory (has been through numerous edits) of the experience.

I'm firmly a materialist. I'm also very comfortable with not knowing, with absolute certainty, how the brain works its magic. Any good scientist ought to be comfortable with saying, “I don't know.” Not knowing is half the fun – gives us a mystery to solve, and humans love mysteries. Unfortunately, system one thinks it can solve all of them as quickly as I can snap my fingers.

I may not really know how the nuts and bolts create what they do, but I have no doubt that they do. I see no reason to inject another mystery in an attempt to solve this one. The human brain is incredibly complex and we're still in the early stages of exploring it.

u/Nausved · 1 pointr/whatisthisthing

It can be helpful to sit down and try to draw a photorealistic image. Seriously. I suggest doing it right now. Draw your desk and everything on it exactly as they are, without using grids, measurements, perspective lines, or other "cheats" that Renaissance artists developed. Just draw precisely what you see.

You may have perfect penmanship and eye-hand coordination, but you'll probably still discover that what you've drawn doesn't match what you see in real life. You will almost certainly get angles and proportions incorrect (even artists who've be practicing mindfully for years get these wrong if they aren't careful or don't use aforesaid "cheats").

What's going on there? Interpretation. Your brain looks at all the shapes and colors presented to it by your eyes. Then it identifies the objects you're seeing, and it retrieves data it knows about them. For example, it knows what your desk would look like from any angle. It can guess the hardness and texture of your desk. It knows where the desk ends and the object on it begins. It know what those objects look like from different angles. What they likely feel like, how heavy they likely are, where their centers of mass likely are, etc. It's making assumptions about what color everything would appear under bright daylight, under artificial light, or in shadow.

All of this information is noise. It distracts you from drawing only what you see. Instead of blindly copying what your eyes have gathered, you find yourself influenced by your brain's interpretations. It's very, very hard to bypass this; Even when you know you're being fooled (such as in the case of optical illusions), it can be very hard to ignore your brain's faulty assumptions. Our brain's visual system is marvellously intelligent and advanced, and it stick its fingers in everything we see.

Artists have to overcome all that, and that takes a lot of practice and a certain amount of cheating—like using rulers, blocking in with abstract shapes, drawing silhouettes, sometimes even drawing upside down!

If you want to learn more, research in the field of computer vision provides some fascinating insights into the way human visual intelligence works. A good book on the subject is Visual Intelligence by Donald Hoffman.