Comment by jlhawn

Comment by jlhawn 3 days ago

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Now I can't stop thinking about _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. It theorizes that this is how humans navigate and experience the real world: Our brains generate what we think the world around is like and our senses don't so much directly process visual information but instead act like a kind of loss function for our internal simulations. Then we use that error to update our internal model of the world.

In this view, we are essentially living inside a high-fidelity generative model. Our brains are constantly 'hallucinating' a predicted reality based on past experience and current goals. The data from our senses isn't the source of the image; it's the error signal used to calibrate that internal model. Much like Genie 3 uses latent actions and frames to predict the next state of a world, our brains use 'Active Inference' to minimize the gap between what we expect and what we experience.

It suggests that our sense of 'reality' isn't a direct recording of the world, but a highly optimized, interactive simulation that is continuously 'regularized' by the photons hitting our retinas.

namanyayg 2 days ago

This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness.

We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter.

This is one of the core tenets of Buddhism, and it's also expounded on Greg Egan's short novel "Learning to Be Me". He's one of my favorite sci-fi authors and this particular short led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading many of his works within a few months.

I found a copy online, if you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and check it out. You won't be able to put it down and the ending is sublime. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1995-egan.pdf

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  • grumbelbart2 2 days ago

    This is absolutely what happens. It's even more tricky since our sensory inputs have different latencies which the brain must compile back into something consistent. While doing so it interprets and filters out a lot of unsurprising, expected data.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8

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  • keeeba 2 days ago

    “ This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness. We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter.”

    This is an orthodox position in modern philosophy, dating back to at least Locke, strengthened by Kant and Schopenhauer. It’s held up to scrutiny for the past ~400 years.

    But really it’s there in Plato too, so 2300+ years. And maybe further back

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    • namanyayg a day ago

      Indeed, it's been great learning about the various interpretations as this idea took hold over the years!

      What I wasn't able to properly highlight is how this belief has become a fundamental part of my day to day, moment to moment experience. I enjoy the constant and absolute knowledge that everything that's happening is my interpretation. And it gives me a superpower -- because for most of my life the world felt unforgiving and unpredictable. But it's actually the complete opposite, since whatever we interpret is actually in our control.

      I also credit my understanding of this as a reality vs an intellectual concept to Siddhartha Gautam and his presentation of "samsara". But wherever it comes from, it is an inescapable idea and I encourage all HNers to dive deeper.

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    • prox 2 days ago

      It’s the Allegory of the Cave, isn’t it?

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      • ethbr1 2 days ago

        Afaik, there's a difference between classical philosophy (which opines on the divide between an objective world and the perceived word) and more modern philosophy (which generally does away with that distinction while expanding on the idea that human perception can be fallible).

        The idea that there's an objective but imperceivable world (except by philosophers) is... a slippery slope to philosophical excess.

        It's easy to spin whatever fancy you want when nobody can falsify it.

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      • quuxplusone 2 days ago

        In my amateur opinion, it's almost the opposite. For Plato, the material world, while "real" enough, is less important and in some sense less True than the higher immaterial world of Forms or Ideas. The highest, truest, realest world is "above" this one, related to cognition, and (more or less) accessible by reason. We may be in a cave, but all we have to do is walk up into the sunlight — which, by the way, is nothing but a higher and truer form of light than our current firelight. (This idea that material objects partake of their corresponding higher-level Ideas leads to the Third Man paradox: if it is the Form of Man that compasses similar material instances such as Socrates and Achilles, is there then a third... thing... that compasses Socrates, Achilles, and Man itself?)

        For Kant, and therefore for Schopenhauer, the visible world is composed merely of objects, which are by definition only mental representations: a world of objects "exists" only in the mind of a subject. If there is a Thing-in-Itself (which even Kant does not doubt, if I recall correctly), it certainly cannot be a mental representation: the nature of the Thing-in-Itself is unknowable (says Kant) but certainly in no way at all like the mere object that appears to our mental processes. (Schopenhauer says the Thing-in-Itself is composed of pure Will, whatever that means.) The realest world is "behind" or "below" the visible one, completely divorced from human reason, and by definition completely inaccessible to any form of cognition (which includes the sensory perception we share with the animals, as well as the reason that belongs to humans alone). The Third Man paradox makes no sense at all for Kant, first because whatever the ineffable Thing-in-Itself is, it certainly won't literally "partake" of any mental concept we might come up with, and secondly because it would be a category error to suppose that any property could be true of both a mental object and a thing-in-itself, which are nothing alike. (The Thing-in-Itself doesn't even exist in time or space, nor does it have a cause. Time, space, and causality are all purely human frameworks imposed by our cognitive processes: to suppose that space has any real existence simply because you perceive it is, again, a category error, akin to supposing that the world is really yellow-tinged just because you happen to be wearing yellow goggles.)

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  • byronvickers 2 days ago

    Thank you for linking this! I'm a big fan of Egan but had never read this particular short story. I feel like Egan is perhaps the only contemporary author who actually _gets_ consciousness.

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    • namanyayg a day ago

      He's the best hard sci fi author by far. Permutation City is also a must read especially because of its thought experiments around consciousness and computation.

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  • ghtbircshotbe 2 days ago

    I'm not sure this is unique to consciousness (whatever that is). What would it even mean to directly interact with the physical world? Even the most precise scientific experiments are a series of indirect measurements of something that perhaps in some sense is fundamentally unknowable.

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    • namanyayg a day ago

      That's a fair point. I envision this as the difference between an electron interacting with the proton or an acid reacting with the base vs me touching my keyboard. Do you feel there's a difference there?

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      • ghtbircshotbe 17 hours ago

        I don't know what consciousness is or how to talk about it. But at a basic level I don't believe there is a category of phenomena separate from the physical world or inaccessible to the scientific method; and if there were I don't know how you would say anything meaningful about them. I am however willing to believe that rocks are not conscious.

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tracerbulletx 3 days ago

I think this is pretty well established as far as neurologists are concerned and explains a lot of things. Like dreaming for instance.. just something like the model running without sensory input constraining it.

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soulofmischief 2 days ago

This is easily corroborated by taking hallucinogens. Your subjective experience is a simulation, augmented by your senses.

Personally I often catch myself making reading mistakes and knowing for a fact that the mistake wasn't just conceptual, but an actual visual error where my brain renders the wrong word. Sometimes it's very obvious because the effect will last for seconds before my vision "snaps" back into reality and the word/phrase changes.

I first noticed this phenomenon in my subjective experience whenever I was 5 and started playing Pokémon. For many months, I thought Geodude was spelled and pronounced Gordude, until my neighbor said the name correctly one day and it "unlocked" my brain's ability to see the word spelled correctly.

The effect is so strong sometimes that I can close my eyes and imagine a few different moments in my life, even as a child, where my brain suddenly "saw" the right word while reading and it changed before my eyes.

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  • thoughtpeddler 2 days ago

    Just want to say this is a really good description of our brain's simulation, and I have experienced the same catching-the-misread-word phenomenon, and it's a subtle reminder about how this is all working. But does this mean our wires are crossed in a particular way that is uncommon? I haven't heard others share a similar experience.

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    • soulofmischief 2 days ago

      I'm not sure. At times I've wondered if I have something similar to dyslexia. There are few common failure modes with me such as flipping consonants or vowels between adjacent words, or writing down a word and it being the wrong one.

      My brain seems to store/recall words phonetically, possibly because I taught myself to read at age 3 with my own phonetic approach, but also possibly due to how I trained myself out of a long spell of aphasia during high school by consciously relearning how to speak in a way that engaged the opposite hemisphere of my brain; thinking in pitches, intonation, rhyme, rhythm, etc. and turning speaking into a musical expression. I'd read about this technique and after months of work I managed to make it work for me. So in that aspect, there really might be some crossed wires out of necessity.

      I was homeless in high school and thus too poor to visit doctors and get scans done, so I'm really not sure if the assumed damage to my left hemisphere which I experienced was temporary or permanent, or even detectable. The aphasia was coupled with years of intense depersonalization and derealization as well. The brain is a very strange thing and many events in my life such as the ones described above have only reinforced to me how subjective my experience really is.

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psychoslave 3 days ago

Like, "Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality" as exposed by Anil Seth[1]? Found that one while searching for something like "the illusion of the self" a few years ago.

It’s also easy to find this treated in various philosophy/religion through time and space. And anyway as consciousness is eager to project whatever looks like a possible fit, elements of suggesting prior arts can be inferred back as far as traces can be found.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo

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cfiggers 3 days ago

Another analogy that kinda fits in with what you're saying is the post-processing on smartphone "photos."

At what point does the processing become so strong that it's less a photograph and more a work of computational impressionism?

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  • direwolf20 2 days ago

    At the point where Samsung detects a photo of a white circle while the phone is pointing upwards and substitutes a high resolution picture of the moon.

    This actually happened.

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eli_gottlieb 2 days ago

Yeah, this kind of thing was part of the subject of my PhD, first postdoc, and ongoing scientific work. The question is how to produce generative models and inverse-inference algorithms that are powerful enough to work in tens to hundreds of milliseconds in high dimensionality :-/

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Gehinnn 2 days ago

Doesn't this have some implications for P vs NP?

How much compute do you need to convince a brain its environment is "real"?

What happens if I build a self replicating super computer in this environment that finds solutions to some really big SAT instances that I can verify?

Dreams run into contradictions quite quickly.

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krzat 2 days ago

It's kinda obvious if you think about this:

- How come we have 2 eyes but see one 3d world?

- We hear sounds and music coming from various directions, but all of this is created from 2 vibrating eardrums

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AIorNot 2 days ago

Let me introduce you to Idealism

And more specifically Analytic Idealism

https://youtu.be/P-rXm7Uk9Ys?si=q7Kefl7PbYfGiChZ

Google DeepMind’s Project Genie is being framed as a “world model.” Given a text prompt, it generates a coherent, navigable, photorealistic world in real time. An agent can move through it, act within it, and the world responds consistently. Past interactions are remembered. Physics holds. Cause and effect persist.

From a technical standpoint, this is impressive engineering. From a philosophical standpoint, it’s an unexpectedly clean metaphor.

In analytic idealism, the claim is not that the physical world is fake or arbitrary. The claim is that what we call the “physical world” is how reality appears from a particular perspective. Experience is primary. The world is structured appearance.

Genie makes this intuitive.

There is no “world” inside Genie in the classical sense. There is no pre-existing ocean, mountain, fox, or library. There is a generative substrate that produces a coherent environment only when a perspective is instantiated. The world exists as something navigable because there is a point of view moving through it.

Change the character, and the same environment becomes a different lived reality. Change the prompt, and an entirely different universe appears. The underlying system remains, but the experienced world is perspective-dependent.

This mirrors a core idealist intuition: reality is not a collection of objects waiting to be perceived. It is a structured field of possible experiences, disclosed through perspectives.

The interesting part is not that Genie “creates worlds.” It’s that the worlds only exist as worlds for an agent. Without a perspective, there is no up, down, motion, danger, beauty, or meaning. Just latent structure.

Seen this way, Genie is not a model of consciousness. It’s a model of how worlds arise from viewpoints.

If you replace “agent” with “local mind,” and “world model” with “cosmic mental process,” the analogy becomes hard to ignore. A universal consciousness need not experience everything at once. It can explore itself through constrained perspectives, each generating a coherent, law-bound world from the inside.

That doesn’t prove idealism. But it makes the idea less mystical and more concrete. We are already building systems where worlds are not fundamental, but perspectival.

And that alone is worth sitting with.

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  • Rzor 2 days ago

    It's pretty clear you used an LLM to write that, given your post history. I'm not sure that's allowed here, but at least put a disclaimer.

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    • AIorNot 2 days ago

      Yes I used an LLM - to post my thoughts from my phone as typing that down and spell checking/grammar cleanup is hell on mobile -

      - but does it mean I don’t believe all the words written above are valid? No absolutely not.

      I reviewed and copyedited what I posted and the meaning is exactly what I intended to post so I’m not sure what’s the issue here

      If we use LLMs to expound on our own thoughts is it a crime? They are literal masters of wordplay and rote clarification on complex topics so I think this is a very legitimate use-case for them, since I was going for clarity as an objective- esp considering the topic

      Also none of my previous posts were LLM written (including this one)

      People are a little over-sensitive on this topic these days

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  • soulofmischief 2 days ago

    Consciousness and perspective are temporally stable fixed points in the universe. You come to understand yourself as "you" or "I" because it's the only thing in the world around you that does not immediately change under many transformations.

    For example, you can spin around, or change position, or close your eyes, and you're still you. As you navigate and interact with the evolving universe, the only continual, relatively unchanging part of the experience is what your brain uses to differentiate itself from the rest of your perceptions.

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