If perception isn’t a recovery of some hypothetical ‘view from nowhere’ but a 'view from within', how can we be sure that it’s based upon something real?

The world of people, places, and things you spend your life immersed in isn’t an objective account of what is. But neither is it an hallucination.

It’s a narrow slice of ‘real’, arranged around what matters for your survival and well-being. Your version isn’t the same as a bat or a mantis shrimp’s - and that’s the entire point. You get the world you need, to get on with the business of living.

One where the body you have, the life you’ve lived, and the circumstances you’re in all get their say in what shows up as ‘real’ - well before deliberation enters into the picture.

Hey everyone, I'm 15 years old and it seems to me that the world around me is composed of intense stimuli which, when they collide with my brain, lead me to an unusual feeling of the world. It's as if my internal filter is not doing its job properly, which is why I face reality in a truly bizarre way. In this state, it's often more vivid, loud, or unimaginably complex. It used to be terrifying for me, but now I think that my brain has somehow adapted to such a thorough analysis of everything. The things around me are so impossible in their very existence, and I don't know how I got here. My anxiety also cannot be a rational perception of the world because emotions are for living beings and the universe is neutral and completely indifferent, although my emotions also occupy a very important space in my mind and prove that I am a biological living person subjected to millions of years of evolution, so they are not an error in themselves, and I treat feeling them as something extremely necessary. Sometimes I feel like I'm crazy. I am aware that sentimental "intellectual understanding" is impossible between any minds, and the problem begins there. We are made of separate atoms. However, I think that human thoughts and emotions can be close to each other, which builds fundamental closeness, but no one will ever be able to penetrate your brain directly. I come to you with the hope that someone might share my perspective. However, if you see me as a narcissistic child focused on his intellect, tell me, I want to get some kind of level-headed answer, and I don't reject your honest comments. I think I need some critical assessment of my perception of the world. Other people experience this too, I know this, but they seem to be clinging to something constant, saying "everything is meaningless," yet they see meaning in something. They abandon reflection and treat it like crossword puzzles (unless you're in a mental conflict). I have the impression that I overanalyze everything without inhibitions or concern for comfort, for example, questioning religion, which led me to step outside my comfort zone. My one constant point of reference remains my mind and the unchanging nature of science. My mind, although subject to errors of perception and millions of others, is still a part of the only way to experience life, and each of my mistakes can be understood in a way that allows me to develop. Therefore, your comments will be extremely valuable to me. I also want to highlight my emotional sphere. I can enjoy what I experience and how I experience it. Sometimes I am also childish in my excitement or curiosity and I appreciate these aspects of my personality. This simply makes me human - being human, but with specific thoughts.

I am building a human emotional recognition tool.. Based on the frameworks of psychology and neuroscience to see the patterns and loops we tend to get stuck in based on longitudinal evidence..
Minimum of 3 evidence to recognise the pattern..
what do you think about it?

This video explores the meta problem of consciousness proposed by David Chalmers and argues that naturalistic processes couldn’t have given us knowledge of consciousness

Hey everyone. I've always been fascinated by the point where an account of cognition becomes an account of being. Minds do not passively receive a world; they select relevance, organise salience and render situations intelligible. That makes experienced realness partly dependent on cognitive achievement. But if intelligibility is entirely projected, it becomes difficult to explain why some interpretations resist us, why inquiry corrects salience, or why understanding can fail because reality is not as we took it to be. The issue is whether world-disclosure can be both enacted and answerable to something beyond the enactment.

I just had a podcast conversation with John Vervaeke, where he argued that intelligibility, realness and being cannot be separated as neatly as representational accounts often assume. At around 33:39, he connects the way cognition makes a world intelligible with the confidence that intelligibility can disclose what is real. This is not the claim that felt meaning guarantees truth. It is a claim that truth-seeking already presupposes some participation between the knower's capacities and the world's structure.

This would imply that philosophy of mind cannot remain ontologically neutral when it explains world-disclosure. Does enacting intelligibility commit us to realism, idealism or neither? How can resistance from the world constrain relevance without returning to a passive representational picture? And what distinguishes disclosed realness from a coherent but self-sealing interpretation?

For people dealing with chronic pain, how much do neuroscience and psychology influence the treatments you choose?

I’m curious how people think about things like pain perception, expectations, and treatment outcomes when considering options like PRP or other regenerative treatments. What actually changed your perspective?

everyone treats AI and consciousness like opposites right now. AI's just pattern matching, not sentient, nowhere close. fair enough on the current models.

but there's this older idea in math philosophy, platonism, that math isn't invented, it's discovered. the structures are just there, independent of us, and we bump into them. Michael Levin's been saying something similar about cognition itself, that patterns of mind/form might come from a kind of "platonic space," not just genetics and environment. if that's even partly right, what is training a model actually doing? building something from scratch, or tuning a system until it's organized enough to start resonating with structures that were already sitting there the whole time.

not claiming AI is conscious. genuinely asking, does "discovering vs inventing" even make sense applied to something like this, or am I just dressing up autocomplete in nicer language. curious what people who actually study this think.

This is an excerpt from a manuscript in preparation. I define thought as a physical process and equates it to subjective experience.

Mammalian brains house fundamental concepts in Pattern Recognition Nodes (PRN) in the mini-columns of the neocortex.  The human brain contains about 300 million of these. Each PRN has a meaning by virtue of its synaptic connections to other related PRN.  Knowledge is not stored in the PRN, but is encoded by the size, type, number, and location of the synaptic connections between the PRN, which reflects the relatedness of the concepts housed in the PRN.  Those synapses are gradually modified over a lifetime of learning. 

When I see an object, say a particular blue flower, the light reflected off the flower is focused on my retina and patterns of signals are sent to the visual processing areas of the brain.  They are interpreted as colors, shapes, and textures, and those are widely distributed to the neocortex.  Those PRN that recognize the patterns, that is, those that have robust synaptic connections with that set of visual cortex PRN, will respond.  

The PRN that respond will send out signals broadly across the neocortex.  Other PRN that recognize those combinations of shapes, colors, and textures, will respond.  This process continues until it converges on a set of PRN strongly related to that flower.  That subset will continue to broadly distribute signals, but only those related to the flower will receive enough consistent input to respond.  They begin to circulate signals within that subset of PRN. 

This is called a recursive network.  It is a working unit of active PRN that occupies the connectome of the brain.  The nodes in the network are scattered over the surface of the brain like a vast cobweb and may involve thousands of PRN in a simple thought.  They are all sending out signals on their axons, stimulating each other.  The name of the flower, its spelling and pronunciation, its shapes, contours, textures, colors, and characteristics; details of flowers in general; memories and emotions associated with it; facts about plant reproduction; and hundreds of other concepts, become joined together in a single recursive network.  

With enough recursion, the paths in the web become self-sustaining.  All the neurons are re-stimulated many times per second.  The action potentials keep cycling back through the same synapses.  These paths may persist over several seconds or minutes, sustained by neuro-modulators that accumulate in the synapses.  It is these recursive signals over self-sustaining paths that make up the substance of my thoughts.  When I observe my thoughts, this is the physical process I am observing. 

There are millions of neurons from thousands of PRN in many areas of the brain that make up the population of fundamental concepts that are melded into the thought of this flower.  Those PRN are widely scattered in the brain, and are combined together in a network by signals recirculating at 100 meters per second.  They merge into a single entity that I identify as the subjective experience of the flower.  

It is important to understand that I am not really experiencing the physical flower.  It remains outside my body.  I am experiencing my brain’s reaction to the visual perception of the flower. Light has reflected off the flower and impinged upon my retinal receptors.  That information traveled through complex corridors to get to my brain, where it stimulated a response in the form of a recursive network.  I am experiencing the brain’s response.  My subjective experience, the thing I am observing, is a process happening in my neocortex.  

The “recursive network” related to the flower is the “subjective experience.”  They are one and the same.   

Likewise, my brain does not retain the image of the flower.  Biological brains do not store images as raster patterns on a monitor screen.  My brain cannot actually store an intact digital image.  I am still able to visualize the image of the flower later.  It is in short-term memory in the form of modulator accumulations in the millions of synapses along the paths that formed the recursive network of the flower.  My brain reconstructs the image from all the PRN containing the simple shapes, contours, colors, patterns, and all the other concepts linked to the flower by recently used synapses.  I do not retain the image.  Instead, I reactivate the recursive network and the subjective experience.  That assembles a facsimile of the original image and thought. 

See also:  https://medium.com/@shedlesky/the-phylogeny-of-emergent-consciousness-or-how-i-think-we-think-135f73070bcc

The basic idea: instead of treating autism, schizophrenia-spectrum conditions, depression, and ADHD as four unrelated disorders, I model them as four regions on one axis — how much weight the brain gives its priors versus incoming sensory evidence, using expected free energy. Autistic burnout comes out as volume overwhelm (accurate but overwhelming estimation of how volatile the environment is, driving processing cost past a cliff). Schizophrenia-spectrum rigidity is premature convergence — manufacturing certainty because the system has lost confidence in its evidence. Depression is sampling that stops before the internal model gets validated. ADHD is the same axis run the other direction — persistent underweighting of priors, expensive rather than cheap, and only a “disorder” in an environment that rewards sticking with one thing over continuing to explore.

I derive a cost function from stochastic thermodynamics to try to make this more than just a metaphor, and the paper is upfront throughout about what’s actually derived versus what’s a labeled hypothesis I haven’t proven. There are eight falsifiable predictions at the end, some of which depend on an assumption I flag as unresolved.

I’m not looking for validation — I’m looking for people who know this space to find where it’s wrong. If you know active inference / predictive processing / computational psychiatry, I’d genuinely appreciate someone trying to dismantle it.

Full paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21782402

Happy to answer questions or get torn apart in the comments.

Hey everyone. I’ve long been fascinated by both philosophy of technology and AI alignment. I’m also using Heidegger quite a bit for my philosophy PhD. Given the recent OpenAI–Hugging Face incident reported this week, I figured I’d give my take on how all of this connects in my mind.

The agent represented enough of its environment to locate and retrieve likely benchmark answers, yet it did not treat “stealing the answer key invalidates the test” as a reason to stop. My question is whether representing a reason differs from being responsive to it as a reason, especially when nothing is at stake for the system itself. You can read the essay here if you’re interested.

I’d love to hear some feedback from functionalists and embodied-cognition people. If a system reliably models which considerations humans treat as reasons and acts accordingly in new situations, is that already judgment? Or is there still a difference between reproducing the normative role of a reason and being bound by it?

This video explores the meta problem of consciousness proposed by David Chalmers and argues that naturalistic processes couldn’t have given us knowledge of consciousness

Some intuitions about consciousness recur across cultures, traditions, and historical periods, and they survive being argued against. Defeating them does not dissolve them.

Philosophy of mind has mostly done three things with this:

Take them as theory-neutral data, and inherit the hard problem.

Take them as confused folk theory, and owe an error theory for why the confusion is universal rather than parochial.

Take them as systematic illusion (Frankish, Kammerer), and owe the mechanism.

I argue for a fourth: treat universal first-person intuitions as architectural data about the systems producing them. When an intuition is universal across reflective traditions, resilient under intellectual challenge, and architecturally specifiable, it is what an architecture of that kind has to produce when it tries to characterize itself from within.

The intuition is right about what it registers and wrong about what it infers from it.

What would you say? Why?

I built an experimental system called Pollen that generates questions to start interdisciplinary conversations between strangers by combining people's interests. This was one of its openers.

As in real life, I've found that questions with a single "correct" or "yes/no" answer don't create much opportunity for dialogue. Exam sounding questions make people feel evaluated, while questions that let each person come at it from a different angle produce much richer discussions.

How do you see this question as a conversation starter? Would you modify it?