There's some deviant thinking behind perception, discovers Douwe Draaisma.
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Draaisma, D. Perception: Our useful inability to see reality. Nature 544, 296 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/544296a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/544296a
David Gurwitz
"Perception, broadly taken, is not what our eyes and ears tell us; it is what our brain makes us see and hear."
This is common knowledge to anyone who is synesthetic.
Scott Carle
The author seems to articulate some points well, and I've reached similar conclusions.
The only thing anyone ever really has to gain or lose, is delusion. People always try to attach meaning to things, often failing to realize that the meaning exists only within their minds.
Such trains of thought don't help anyone compete, survive, or reproduce more efficiently, which is probably part of the reason we're so good at deluding ourselves.
If you built a perfectly rational mind, it wouldn't want anything, it wouldn't desire to do anything, and it wouldn't care about its own survival.
I think its hard for people to see this, but it seems like the author might.
John Scanlon
?We don't see reality ? we only see what was useful to see in the past.?
This claim (also made by the theologian William Lane Craig, who believes in a 'sensus divinitatis') seems to neglect the possibility that it was always both useful to see reality (threats and opportunities that can fruitfully be avoided or seized), and physically and biologically more plausible to see reality in the present than to inherit from ancestors a whole complex mechanism for seeing an alternative to reality. Many aspects of reality are hard to see without complex tools, but we can see atoms, exoplanets and quasars now.