AE: Your feelings are always kind of virtual: Nerve signals are reaching
your brain, get interpreted, trigger new signals. What you are seeing,
hearing, feeling is not the exact input of your nerves but a mapping of
these inputs to your internal virtual reality.
GS: Think about the notion that what we see is some sort of distorted copy
of the world. According to this view, the world is copied (albeit
upside-down and distorted) on the retina. This copy is then split up into
parts and sent scrambling around the brain, but its sum total is still some
kind of representation (actually, this gives rise to the pseudo-problem
called the "binding problem"). This process continues on and on, but not
infinitely. At some point there must be some other part of the brain that
"sees" or otherwise "utilizes this information." But that would mean that
there is a sort of seeing or "information utilization" that does not require
copies. But why can seeing the world not be of this sort?
I started a new post because somehow I have been prevented from replying to
AE's post under the original thread. Anyone know how that is possible?