Intelligence Machines
We experience the world around us through our senses. In the book “The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality”, Andy Clark makes a case for our brains being prediction machines that shape our reality vs. being objective, impartial processors of sensory information. A logical conclusion from that thesis is that there is no “objective” reality, that our brains shape that reality. Briefly, his thesis is:
the brain is best understood as a prediction machine similar to the neural networks (which sought to emulate the brains 😀)
we perceive things by continuously predicting the world around us and through a continuous process of error correction driven by the sensory inputs, refines the model of the world and gets closer to reality
by starting with a prediction and merely focusing on deviations from the predictions, this whole apparatus optimizes the amount of information that needs to be processed.
There is a lot more to the theory and its implications and the book is an excellent read. To give you a flavor for it, here is a short excerpt:
That Dress, and Other Illusions
In February 2015, a social media spark lit an unstoppable fire that spread through the internet, spawning 10 million rapid retweets and enlivening many a family dinner conversation. The spark was a picture of a dress, due to be worn to a wedding in Scotland. As almost everyone reading these words will recall, many viewers saw that dress as clearly gold and white while others were utterly convinced it was blue and black. If you were away on Mars that year, check it out online. I belonged firmly to the gold and white camp. But we gold-and-whiters lose (at least insofar as it is possible to lose here at all) as the actual dress, when viewed under normal lighting conditions, will appear blue and black. How do we make sense of this radical variation between experiences?
[He goes on to describe the Ponzo illusion as a comparison to the “dress”]
Much the same reasoning applies in the case of the dress. But there, disagreement occurs because different people's brains seem to be assuming rather different things about the depicted scene—in particular, the opposing (blue versus gold) camps make different assumptions about the lighting in the room. These include assumptions about the general level of brightness in the room, the positioning of the light source, and whether the dress is in shadow or not in shadow. Brains that make different assumptions about those conditions will make different inferences about the color of the dress, leading some to see the dress as clearly and indisputably blue, and others as clearly and indisputably gold.
So the model of the world that their brain had, determined what they saw. Reality is shaped by our brain’s model of the world. I have been noodling through it for a few weeks while also exploring a couple of other strands of related thought. Peter Wohlleben’s series of books on trees and forests starting with “The Heartbeat of Trees” (which I might expound on in a future article); the deeper question about reality exemplified on the extreme end of the spectrum by Bishop George Berkeley (Immaterialism and “Esse est percipi”); and closer to my view of the world, the line of argument represented by Descartes (“Cogito Ergo Sum”) and the Vedantic concept of “Maya”.
I will be brief about Peter Wohlleben’s books. I obliquely referred to this when I discussed Komorebi. Since our brain is a prediction machine, more surprises that it has to encounter, more present you have to be in the moment. According to Wohlleben, trees exist in a massive, rich reality of their own. They have deep running dialogs at a different timescale than us but because of our limitations we can only interpret a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic and chemical spectrum, and we look at a forest and perceive nothing but static, silent wood.
What Andy Clark calls a 'predictive machine,' ancient Advaita Vedanta philosophy described as the cosmic veil of Maya—the idea that our perceived material world is a view of the world that is construction of our mind rather than absolute, unfiltered truth. Western philosophical tradition also flirted with this concept - Bishop Berkeley’s Subjective Idealism ("To be is to be perceived"), that we never touch a raw "physical matter," only our mind's prediction of it.
Descartes and Advaita diverge on the fact that while Descartes believes in the duality (the self and world being separate) Advaita translates to ”not-two”. In Advaita Vedanta philosophy, Maya is the creative power that makes the singular, ultimate reality (Brahman) appear as a fragmented world of separate objects, people, and experiences. The Sanskrit root of Maya relates to measuring, structuring, or building a form. Think of Maya as your friendly user interface to the underlying reality of the cosmos. Hindu philosophy suggests that your desires, and mental conditioning create a subjective filter through which you view the world. If you believe the world is a hostile place, Maya obliges, reinforcing that projection through your actions and experiences.
It is interesting to see these seemingly different worldviews speak to certain tantalizing and profound foundational concepts. If our minds are actively predicting and shaping reality, we are not passive victims of a fixed environment. By changing our mental conditioning (prior probabilities in neural networks and Samskaras in Vedantic philosophy), we actively change the world we experience.