All matter is a cognitive ‘hallucination,’ even the brain itself

I agree that internal experience is sometimes closely aligned with the external world and sometimes not so closely aligned. But I'm not sure why that is a particularly important detail. It's just a question of the fidelity of the internal experience.

I don't know how to answer whether consciousness is an "illusion," because I am suspicious that we have different definitions of "hallucination," "illusion," etc.

~~ Paul

If we aren't evolving toward fidelity then it becomes difficult for us to say that we have a true map of reality. Essentially what we perceive need not be an accurate picture of what's out there, it just needs to be effective in keeping us alive.

As Hoffman would say we need to take the iconography of our experience seriously, but we should not assume the icons are the world as it really is.

I guess we can say "illusion" refers to a mistaken interpretation of consensus experience, "hallucination" is a private experience that inaccurately seems to be part of the consensus experience. Of course you still need an experiencer to have an erroneous experience, and as such its nonsensical to say consciousness itself is an illusion or hallucination.

Anil Seth, likely following his mentor Dennet, seems to use hallucination as something that isn't out there but projected onto the world, but then as the article in the OP notes the brain then is also just a hallucination. 

I would think it's better to say brains are part of the iconography, being a part of our consensus experience yet mysterious in its actual constitution...just like all that's "material" &/or "physical"...

I don't think you can just-so the claim that a physical brain has no ability to create abstractions. I have no idea why you would think this is the case.

Simple logic. Matter, physics and chemistry do not demonstrate any abstractive capabilities ~ so brains do not, either, being purely physical and chemical entities. Abstractions are purely creations of conscious intent, and purely physical and chemical entities do not have any intrinsic consciousness.

A blind physical system, a machine, does not transcend being a blind physical system or machine simply because some bits in some particular, certain configuration. That just doesn't make sense.

I don't know what the external world is, except that there clearly is one. For example, when I go on holiday and return home, the trees in my yard are in the same place. That has nothing to do with my being conscious of them. They might not exist independently of my memory, but how could we know?

The external world is just an interpretation by our senses. Yes, the external world is stable, but that doesn't mean that we can say what it is or why it's like that. We have nothing more, nothing less, than just raw experience, and however many interpretations, beliefs and framings we want to filter that experience through. It's a bit like the blind men and an elephant story...

I don't think I'm a direct realist, since I agree that we perceive things filtered through some kind of internal model of the world that can hide or distort the things we perceive, or even invent something quite different. But this doesn't mean that our perception isn't usually more or less like the external things, and that it's possible to use instruments to make our perception closer, or to take something like a drug to make our perception more distorted.

~~ Paul

Except that a great number of philosophers would strongly disagree with ~ there is no logical reason why our perception should be any kind of accurate match of an external world:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/

Except that a great number of philosophers would strongly disagree with ~ there is no logical reason why our perception should be any kind of accurate match of an external world:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/

Causal efficacy is probably the best reason to think there's some kind of match, though of course we could just be in some kind of Matrix scenario.

I think we can say there is stuff outside of our own private experience, and it matches a consensus experience. Where people like Anil Seth go wrong is when they claim the brain "hallucinates" the world it presents.. He even talks about the brain's guess work in choosing what to show...

But who is the brain projecting this oxymoronic accurate-hallucination to? And brains doing "guess work" seems like smuggling consciousness into what is just supposed to be some kind of "physical" stuff that is non-conscious.

Really to me the Dualist and Materialist go awry when they start talking about this "stuff" that is "physical" being non-conscious [outside of consciousness], yet is only ever known via consciousness (both via the senses and modeled by proof-back[ed] maths). At least the Dualist understands that the "physical" cannot produce the mental, the Materialist is sadly just hopeless in that regard.

I don't know what the external world is, except that there clearly is one. For example, when I go on holiday and return home, the trees in my yard are in the same place. That has nothing to do with my being conscious of them. They might not exist independently of my memory, but how could we know?

Some Eukaryote, for example higher plants like angiosperms (eg flowering plants/trees) - don't have centrioles, it's theorised this change occurred millions of years ago. Higher plants don't move around in spacetime, instead they often sit there looking pretty, and are often dependent on the Eukaryota that can move around for their existence, and Eukaryota in turn are dependent on them. Higher plants do still have similar helix-like cylindrical Microtubule (MT) forming tubulin proteins, but they exhibit differences, and errors in formation, compared with MT's in animals and even lower plants. Without this change, millions of years ago, the trees in your yard, would not exist.

Now you may say, you don't see the connection between this, and your thought experiment about the trees in your yard.

But my idea, is that 'experience' is only a calculated result, not the 'data' itself. The result of calculating the 'data', obscures the 'data'. The result (experience) seems to be the shared processing of alike mathematical structures (patterns, or relationships). A good candidate for the shared structures, are the mathematical structures of these helix-like cylindrical protein structures (MT's), it may not even be their mathematical structure directly, but rather their internal structure which orders the mathematical structure of water, which may be where a 1:1 mathematical structure of 'experience' (the result) is being calculated.

So where your trees are maintained... is in the shared mathematical structure of these highly conserved helix-like biological structures, which can add-up in non-causal ways.

Some Eukaryote, for example higher plants like angiosperms (eg flowering plants/trees) - don't have centrioles, it's theorised this change occurred millions of years ago. Higher plants don't move around in spacetime, instead they often sit there looking pretty, and are often dependent on the Eukaryota that can move around for their existence, and Eukaryota in turn are dependent on them. Higher plants do still have similar helix-like cylindrical Microtubule (MT) forming tubulin proteins, but they exhibit differences, and errors in formation, compared with MT's in animals and even lower plants. Without this change, millions of years ago, the trees in your yard, would not exist.

Now you may say, you don't see the connection between this, and your thought experiment about the trees in your yard.

But my idea, is that 'experience' is only a calculated result, not the 'data' itself. The result of calculating the 'data', obscures the 'data'. The result (experience) seems to be the shared processing of alike mathematical structures (patterns, or relationships). A good candidate for the shared structures, are the mathematical structures of these helix-like cylindrical protein structures (MT's), it may not even be their mathematical structure directly, but rather their internal structure which orders the mathematical structure of water, which may be where a 1:1 mathematical structure of 'experience' (the result) is being calculated.

So where your trees are maintained... is in the shared mathematical structure of these highly conserved helix-like biological structures, which can add-up in non-causal ways.

I guess I'm bothered by both Paul's and Max's points of view on this. They both seem to equate mathematical processing with "experience". But "experience" per the Hard Problem is incommensurate with data processing of any kind. Experience or awareness and other aspects of consciousness like qualia and even agency and thought are inherent properties or aspects of consciousness and in an entirely different and higher extistential realm than matter and energy and mathematics. Their point of view seems to be a reversion to materialism. If "experience" or awareness is only a calculated result, it's nature is calculation, which has nothing to do with consciousness.

I guess I'm bothered by both Paul's and Max's points of view on this. They both seem to equate mathematical processing with "experience". But "experience" per the Hard Problem is incommensurate with data processing of any kind. Experience or awareness and other aspects of consciousness like qualia and even agency and thought are inherent properties or aspects of consciousness and in an entirely different and higher extistential realm than matter and energy and mathematics. Their point of view seems to be a reversion to materialism. If "experience" or awareness is only a calculated result, it's nature is calculation, which has nothing to do with consciousness.

That's your own bias. Mathematics only describes the shared relationships of the architecture upon which Experience arises/emerges. Maths is not the architecture, it is a way we can describe something which is hidden.

If we aren't evolving toward fidelity then it becomes difficult for us to say that we have a true map of reality. Essentially what we perceive need not be an accurate picture of what's out there, it just needs to be effective in keeping us alive.

As Hoffman would say we need to take the iconography of our experience seriously, but we should not assume the icons are the world as it really is.

I guess we can say "illusion" refers to a mistaken interpretation of consensus experience, "hallucination" is a private experience that inaccurately seems to be part of the consensus experience. Of course you still need an experiencer to have an erroneous experience, and as such its nonsensical to say consciousness itself is an illusion or hallucination.

Anil Seth, likely following his mentor Dennet, seems to use hallucination as something that isn't out there but projected onto the world, but then as the article in the OP notes the brain then is also just a hallucination. 

I would think it's better to say brains are part of the iconography, being a part of our consensus experience yet mysterious in its actual constitution...just like all that's "material" &/or "physical"...

Oh, I wouldn't claim that we have a true map of reality. But it can certainly be fairly true-ish, no? In particular, it can be a reduced map of reality, in order to save brain power and response time. And, of course, we don't even sense all the possible external inputs, such as infrared light.

I'm not sure trying to carefully define the terms is particularly useful. There are inner experiences that reflect external events more or less, and there are inner experiences that are generated from information already in the brain. And these lie on spectra.

~~ Paul

Simple logic. Matter, physics and chemistry do not demonstrate any abstractive capabilities ~ so brains do not, either, being purely physical and chemical entities. Abstractions are purely creations of conscious intent, and purely physical and chemical entities do not have any intrinsic consciousness.

A blind physical system, a machine, does not transcend being a blind physical system or machine simply because some bits in some particular, certain configuration. That just doesn't make sense.


The external world is just an interpretation by our senses. Yes, the external world is stable, but that doesn't mean that we can say what it is or why it's like that. We have nothing more, nothing less, than just raw experience, and however many interpretations, beliefs and framings we want to filter that experience through. It's a bit like the blind men and an elephant story...


Except that a great number of philosophers would strongly disagree with ~ there is no logical reason why our perception should be any kind of accurate match of an external world:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/

Why does any particular matter need to demonstrate abstractive capabilities in order for certain combinations of matter to do so? I think you're still making a just-so claim.

I agree that we cannot know what exactly the "external world" is. However, it seems quite reasonable, short of evidence to the contrary, to simply assume that it is an external "physical" world.

There may be no logical reason why our perception should match the external world, but doesn't it seem like that would be the simplest explanation? Is some primitive organism with no brain coming up with a clever interface? How about the next slightly more complex organism?

~~ Paul

Oh, I wouldn't claim that we have a true map of reality. But it can certainly be fairly true-ish, no? In particular, it can be a reduced map of reality, in order to save brain power and response time. And, of course, we don't even sense all the possible external inputs, such as infrared light.

I'm not sure trying to carefully define the terms is particularly useful. There are inner experiences that reflect external events more or less, and there are inner experiences that are generated from information already in the brain. And these lie on spectra.

~~ Paul

I don’t see how experiences would be “generated” from the brain. The brain is an icon in experience, inside the head that is also part of the iconography of experience.

Why would icons in experience be capable of generating experience itself? The icons on my computer screen are not creating the rest of the display or the rest of the computer.

Of course there is something behind all the iconography, and you can even end my localized embodied experience by messing with the iconography in the same way you can delete your hard drive by using the iconography of a user interface. But I think all we can say from looking at the “physical” is that these correlations between my private experience & the consensus experience exist.

Why does any particular matter need to demonstrate abstractive capabilities in order for certain combinations of matter to do so? I think you're still making a just-so claim.

I believe @Valmar 's point is that if matter lacks abstractive capabilities by definition, then there cannot be abstractive capabilities in combinations of matter. Adding an infinite number of 0s still gives us 0 after all.

This relates to something Atheist Horsemen, Neuroscience PhD Sam Harris has written:

To say “Everything came out of nothing” is to assert a brute fact that defies our most basic intuitions of cause and effect—a miracle, in other words...

..Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.

One of the many issues with the odd idea that something outside of all experience exists, but is only known through consciousness, yet bizarrely generates all experience...