[jlhawn]

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]

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

[grumbelbart2]

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

[keeeba]

“ 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

[byronvickers]

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.

[carlosjobim]

> We are never able to interact with the physical world directly

What would count as anything or anyone interacting with the physical world directly?

[ghtbircshotbe]

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.

[tracerbulletx]

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.

[kingstoned]

Could you please give some sources - books or articles or videos on that topic? It's really fascinating

[magospietato]

Always wondered if dreaming is some kind of daily memory consolidation function. Logged short-term/episodic memory being filtered and the important bits baked by replaying in a limited simulacrum.

[soulofmischief]

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.

[thoughtpeddler]

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.

[shagie]

A kurzgesagt on this: Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day https://youtu.be/wo_e0EvEZn8 and the sources for that video - https://sites.google.com/view/sources-reality-is-not-real/

[psychoslave]

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

[cfiggers]

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?

[direwolf20]

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.

[alastair]

Also check out The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman

[AIorNot]

Yes!

Also See essentia foundation videos

https://youtube.com/@essentiafoundation?si=aD-RmB8DF4M_Oc7w

[eli_gottlieb]

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 :-/

[Gehinnn]

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.

[krzat]

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

[polotics]

yes! obligatory Karl Friston reference... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU4qdFgPT0A

Do jump forward to the contents' discussion marker unless you enjoy British professor banter.

[AIorNot]

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.

[Rzor]

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.

[soulofmischief]

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.