i mean, it is absolutely true that, e.g., auditory processing and visual processing operate on fundamentally different timescales, and that the "simulteneity" of our sensorium is a constructed phenomenon. same with the extremely low resolution of our vision, and editing out saccades, etc.
I have just never found the idea that eg saccades mean that our perceptions are not of the world or that we are like observers of an inward show. Tyler Burge went on forever in this vein (against McDowell, in 2005) but it seems like an unjust slide from science to metaphysics
I'm not even sure how to conceptualize the kind of direct perception that we are denied to have on the basis of the fact that we perceive via sense organs (I think that's all you need to get it going; the fancy brains stuff is just extra detail)
Sensory processing happens as early as at the sense organs. There is always processing that doesn’t require the CNS. Source: studied the sensory periphery in grad school.
i think that the first argument -- that the perceived "moment" is constructed from sensory experiences and behaviors that both precede and follow the experience of "making a decision" is pretty troubling.
Well I think that's because people are unreasonably attached to the concept of free will
to be fair, i think that "free will" survives this; it just requires that the idea be applied to a temporal sliding window occupied by a gestalt whose parts act at different speeds.
if i'm reading you right i think i end up somewhere similar; in particular, i think the continuity of the "self" is especially illusory.
I don't! *falls asleep*
We focus a lot on our own interiority, which is fundamentally not comparable to that of others, and less on how we appear to others, which is comparable
The fact that I have about 98% of my email since 1994 in notmuch (I lost a chunk of 1999) is not quite the same as having boxes of diaries but it definitely makes you confront the idea of a continuous self.
just also, if ”we” are observers of an inward show, then are mice that as well, or say mantis shrimp? Recall reading that mice have a predator evasion pattern that is processed in the retina (rapidly approaching object: bad)
i don't mean that there is no verifiable truth, but that we are very much little homunculi who live inside a sensorium which has properties which are convenient for permitting us to react to the real world but have no relation to the way our underlying cognition actually processes its inputs.
What do you think accounts for the contents of our thoughts on this picture? How is it that we are able to think _about_ objects and properties in the world?
Yes there isn't a statement that we aren't homunculi. But, the human-homunculus and the token based LLM homunculus are dramatically different, and if you hypothesize that intelligence is a single thing, the interface to the world could be sufficient to fully explain the differences in behavior
That sensorium is part of me, as much as the homunculus (is that the conscious part of the mind?) The conscious part of the mind is not the whole of me, or separate from the rest of me