Seeing, reality, ambiguity, and the I-function

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/pain-as-an-art-form/?em&ex=1209096000&en=9ffd0e9c3d105239&ei=5087%0A

about pain as an art form. 

Just because we can’t detect all of reality or define reality doesn’t mean that a universal reality doesn’t exist. Sure, reality is not universally experienced, since each individual is limited in their perceptions of the world around them. But there can be one true reality- it’s just that no one person is capable of perceiving it. We each have our own unique perceptions, and there are also aspects of reality (like UV light) that no human can perceive. That doesn’t mean UV light doesn’t exist- we can measure it in other ways. It’s just not feasible to detect or measure all aspects of reality.

I’ve thought of a few examples of the I-function influencing vision. First, when someone reads a sentence that contains a typo (such as a spelling error or a repeated word), they often don’t notice the typo. The eyes are assumedly detecting each letter correctly, so it must be the I-function that compares the input to previous remembered input and fixes the typo. Second, visual hallucinations are a relevant topic that I covered in my recent webpaper on alien abductions. It’s possible for someone to have a vague hallucination and fill in the details (at that time, or later) based on their prior knowledge, much as it is common for witnesses to recreate memories that end up being false. This just goes to show that we can’t trust any one person’s perception because not only is it influenced by what input is available to them, but it can be changed within the brain, sometimes without the person knowing anything was changed.

I think the idea of what reality is takes more thought than originally i had believed.  We've spent a lot of time in this class talking about how subjective all of our experiences are and even the idea that maybe our experiences are simply constructions of the brain.  How can we know what "reality" really is?  Is reality universal and if so how can we tell what is "universal" as we cannot know objectively what others are experiencing.  We do know at some level the general architecture of the nervous system but there are so many tiny differences it seems too difficult to generalize that we all function the same (who can say what proteins each person has and how those proteins respond to input).  Also couldn't our experience of other simply be a construction of our own brain? 

 As to how the I-function ties into all of this reality business, I'm not sure that it is so important.  I don't think there is a way to know if the I-function plays a role in reality because we don't know if reality is universal or simply a subjective experience.  In the event that it is (to some extent) "universally experienced" I suppose I would agree that the I-function does not necessarily play a role in reality, however I am not entirely convinced that this is the case.  To me it seems totally plausible that reality is subjective and maybe even a construction or partially constructed by the I-function.

awareness? self reflection? i think the "I"...yes perhaps....

Our discussion in class this week about “reality” reminded me of one of my favorite passages from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” by Tom Stoppard:

“A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until "My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience. "Look, look," recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead. It must have been mistaken for a deer."

This passage touches on one of the conclusions that we reached in class: that the things we tend to accept as “real” are those things that are constructed in the same way by everyone’s brains (ex: the wall).  I think that there is a parallel between the way our brain integrates the images of a thing that it receives from all of our various senses, and the way that we as a society define reality based on the way that large numbers of people see the world.  We know that it is possible for a person to have a sensory disorder that causes him or her to construct objects differently with different senses (ex: for someone that is visually impaired, a cube may feel like a small, solid object with well-defined edges, but look like a huge blurry blob of color).  So, it follows that it is also quite possible that some individuals construct realities that are quite different from what society has defined as normal.  Do we then tell these people that what they are experiencing (what their “I-function” is telling them) is wrong?  People who are blind or deaf are considered to be to an extent disabled, because their inability to see or hear is a disadvantage in our society.  However, some people would consider synesthesia to be a disorder as well, even though it can be helpful, and provide a heightened awareness of one’s surroundings. I think (and I know some people in our class agree) that we are too quick to assume that the way we perceive things is the “best” way, and also too quick to dismiss alternative perceptions as being flawed.  I look forward to continuing our discussion of reality and the I-function.

I've never contemplated the brain's ability to "fill in the gaps" when it comes to identifying an object, but indeed as it was demonstrated in class with the wall, there is a mechanism by which we can associate the borders or rather the beginning and the end of an object, and to conclude that everything in between belongs to that object as well.

I'm fairly comfortable attributing this ability to the I-function, however it then had me thinking about individuals who have suffered a stroke and can no longer verbally express what an object is. Much of this is explained by possible damage to Wernicke's area which is responsible for language skills, however strokes also often involve damage to the visual field as well. Is the inability to verbally express what an object is, actually an injury to the I-function, where once again the role of corollary discharge signals have been challenged by an abrupt interruption in the pathway of signal transduction?

That our sight literally limits our ability to perceive the world in its entirety makes sense. Were we to have heightened awareness, through visual acuity, this may serve to overwhelm the nervous system and limit us in other ways. If any one sense were heightened over the others, would this make the world around us, our perceptions, more “real?” I would tend to think not, as “real” is only a best “guess,” a piecing together of diverse and simultaneous input to create a tapestry that is “reality.” It seems there is no one, uniform reality, as such. Given the variance in human perception. This seems, in some way, to reconcile the continuum of human behavior in that disparate realities generate disparate behaviors. Are people with autism, who experience heightened sensory perception, hindered by this ability?

Is the I-function, therefore, as Dickinson suggested, a part of the vast possibility that is human reality-generation and behavior? Perhaps the I-function serves to mediate between the nervous system as it pieces together visual stimuli and enables us give shape and texture in the emotional, not literal sense, to what it is that we are seeing. How things that we see make us feel and about what we think upon seeing certain visual cues. Is this the realm of the I-function? The I-function must also work in concert with parts of the nervous system to recall previous experiences and how what we are seeing is in some way a pattern, which can be related to something we have seen in the past. And, so we return to the nervous system’s looping mechanisms. And while we do “see” without the I-function, the I-function may somehow personalize the experience of sight and give it context, layers and meaning beyond the mere physical “reality” of sight.

Based on our discussion in class, I interpreted the I-function as perhaps the "reality" that is an inescapable ambiguity in whatever input we receive. I would say this in terms of dreams that sometimes they may seem very random and terrifying but when one remembers and tries to analyze it they are able to interpret it and perhaps rationalize what the dream actually meant or the purpose of the dream. I would say the fact that we are able to rationalize may be because our I-functions are ambiguously sending us a message in our sleep, or making us think about some previous thoughts in a different context.

I would be interested in what the I-functions role may be in certain instances of experiencing "deja vu". Deja vu is this sense of familiarity and can some times be accompanied by a sense of eeriness as one is put in a situation where they experience something that happened already in the past or perhaps in a previous dream. In terms of the certain experience being previously viewed in a dream can this be attributed to our I-function or of a higher power. Doesn't this issue bring about a clash between science and religion for circumstances like this?

A week ago, Emily Alspector posted a comment titled "Seeing is Believing". After our last few classes, however, I'm fairly well convinced that the seeing-believing causal relationship is actually the reverse of this. It seems like in many instances our eyes do not physically perceive an image, but our mind decides to believe that it is there, and only as a result of this do we "see" the missing image. (As in the dot demo we spoke about last week.) But more significantly still, is when our eyes perceive no physical difference between object, but our mind fills in the difference for us. An example of this phenomenon was the checker-board picture which was part of the lateral-inhibition demonstration. With these sorts of things in mind, I would put forth that (at least sometimes) it is not seeing something which causes us to believe in its existence, but rather belief in something which causes us to see it.

I think that the ambigous figures that we saw in class today, were very interesting. While I have seen many of these ambigous figures before in Psychology class, where it was analyzed that what is seen is based on whether the brain chooses the black or the white to be the background of the image. It also raises a very interesting quiestion about reality, and whether one can trust everything that they see.

This leads me to wonder about hypnosis and how that plays a role in the tricks of the eye, or the tricks of perception. When someone is hypnotized they are in a semi-trance and are very calm, but they tend to see and react to inputs which are not there but which they believe are there. So when we say that our brain is filling in the blindspots with what it thinks should be there, is it really just that we ourselves (possibly our I-functions) are convincing ourselves to see something and hence out of this conviction we see something or form a reality. Could this be similar to hypnosis which essentially works to convince a person of something, which results in their perception of that thing.