Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty by Ginger Campbell

Author:Ginger Campbell [Campbell, Ginger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science & Nature
Publisher: JENTS, LLC
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8 - Thought as Perception

Dr. Campbell: I came away with the feeling that (no pun intended) one of important concepts in your book was the perceptual nature of thought, looking at thought more like the way we look at vision. We understand that optical illusions trick our visual perception but we somehow think that our "thinking" should not be prone to such things.

Dr. Burton: Correct, and I think most of us accept that the brain does everything we experience in terms of thoughts and feelings and all the rest. But we don't somehow recognize that these all come out of little cells that then connect together, and they make a higher level of group. So let's say you take individual cells that see one aspect of motion; so one will see lines and another borders, and they all merge together to make an elemental image of something. Then another will recognize color, or location or that it's in flight. Finally, there'll be another higher level that generates an image that somehow goes into consciousness as a butterfly.

But I don't think we recognize that one of the things that the brain generates is the sensation of the mind looking down at the butterfly, but it comes out of the same material, so that the mind itself is generated by the same neurons that are generating the rest of the perceptions and all of these neurons, collectively in neural networks, are subject to all sorts of perceptual illusions. One of the really wonderful things about mind is it feels different. This age-old mind-body thing really stems from the fact that in the very big picture we feel the mind to be separate from the rest of whatever the brain does because that's what the brain does.

It's a perceptual illusion at the very core. So all these debates about mind-body really are just a misunderstanding about how the brain works.

Dr. Campbell: Didn't you say something about our mental limitations make it impossible for us to accept our mental limitations?

Dr. Burton: Right. We use the sensations [from our brain] to determine what our brain is doing but we can't see our brain or the unconscious, so the limitation we really have is that we can only see what our brain tells us we can see. When our brains tell us about what we can see, it's the one that says to you, oh, I'm thinking about this. All these questions about free will and stuff really get down to what you experience at a conscious level versus what you're actually doing.

Dr. Campbell: One of the things that relates to that is when the ideas seem to come out of nowhere cause we don't have access to where the thoughts came from before they reached our conscious awareness, and we get all kinds of distortions about when this happens. Would you like to talk a little bit about how our brain distorts our perception of when things happen?

Dr. Burton: Sure. The example I use

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