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About LinkBacksDo you believe everything that you think? Do you believe everything that you see?
August 6th, 2007, 01:54 AM
Do you believe everything that you think? Do you believe everything that you see?
No and no, my eyes can play tricks on me and I can think something very stupid and that is unbeliveable. Uusually I belive my senses but when my fingers are numb then I won't belive in my sense of touch would I
But I don't get the point of the thread.
well a classic how we see in our brains through our eyes
the brain works with fuzzy logic, pattern recognition
sometimes you might see a face, read something, which on closer in spection is different than perceived
but please no... we might be in the matrix... man :P
wow... thats deep... as a pond.
August 17th, 2007, 03:38 AM
If you did not you would you be in danger.Originally Posted by youdiehard
If you did not believe the pain when you put your hand in the fire, you would be burned. Or you think you would and suffer accordingly.
Unless of course you did not believe yourself when your brain told you thought you were burned and managed to ignore and it miraculously the burn disappeared.
Except this has never happened, so you are better off believing it and getting medical attention.
It depends what you define as thinking. If I think to myself "1+1=2", I can safely say that is correct (and I don't need any principia mathematica to confirm this!). However, the mind can strain off to the moot random of things, I could say to myself, "atoms look like ducks", which is obviously wrong, but according to your definition, I would believe that as I would believe everything that I think.
I don't really get what your asking, as I can just say "I believe what I think when I believe it is correct, but I don't believe what I think if it isn't correct." Can you somehow make your question more specific?
As for what I see, I have never personally had a hallucination, or any extreme form of peculiar viewing, so for the majority, once my eyes focus I believe what I see. But only mainly with my eyes, I don't always believe what I read, and especially what I see on TV.
Even if you haven't had a hallucination, your senses aren't necessarily very accurate. For one thing, they leave out a lot. THere are wavelengths of light that you can't perceive. There are also many optical illusions. I went to an entire hall of demonstrations of illusions at last spring's Vision Sciences Society meeting. Then, more mundanely, there is the blind spot. Every human eye has a blind area. You don't perceive this because your brain fills in the hole. Usually, it fills it in correctly and you don't notice. But it can make mistakes. Do a little Googling, and you should be able to find some good examples.
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Please take a moment and participate in my Web-based cognition experiments: http://coglanglab.org
Well, I just looked at some experiments on the blind spot. I realised that I was in fact doing one the other day, but didn't realise what it was for. Interesting stuff, about a year ago I was trying to find my blind spot (after a nice explanation of the eye from my biology teacher), but I guess you need an experiment to make it easier than just moving your eyeball around hoping to see it.Even if you haven't had a hallucination, your senses aren't necessarily very accurate. For one thing, they leave out a lot. THere are wavelengths of light that you can't perceive. There are also many optical illusions. I went to an entire hall of demonstrations of illusions at last spring's Vision Sciences Society meeting. Then, more mundanely, there is the blind spot. Every human eye has a blind area. You don't perceive this because your brain fills in the hole. Usually, it fills it in correctly and you don't notice. But it can make mistakes. Do a little Googling, and you should be able to find some good examples.
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Please take a moment and participate in my Web-based cognition experiments: http://coglanglab.org
Either way, I wouldn't say that the blind spot really hinders your vision and perception. It is a very small factor into the height of your full vision spectrum. As for optical illusions, well apart from my computer screen and exhibitions, designed to confuse your senses, there aren't that many natural illusions. Plus with wavelengths of light, I'm guessing your talking about the further ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, which though they are invisible, I don't think it is really necessary to see them.
Though if you have some real life examples, or just a futher argument, i'd be happy to hear it.
August 22nd, 2007, 09:54 AM
One would have to be singularily unimaginative to be in a position where one could believe everything one thinks.
Absolutely not. We perceive, we do not see. We interpret inputs according to various schema. We ignore some things, give weight to others, all the time interpreting, interpreting, long before the 'sight' reaches our conscious mind. So I most definitely do not believe everything I see; I am more inclined to believe what I don't see.
Do I believe everything that I see?
No, but what I percieve or imagine to be seeing is my brains best guess of what is out there, and since most of what I see has been logged as a template over the years and experience few new phenomenons, most of the time my brains 'best guess' is close enough for me.
Many illusions occur when you see something that is different than what you are used to.
Theres many interesting illusions on the net, the latest I've found interesting is the Change Blindness effect that illustrates that are visual memory stores concepts and representations rather than actual images like we often think. Its astounding that a single blank frame can make you oblivious to a proposterous change in a photo unless you happen to be focusing on that specific object/concept. (and once you notice it, its impossible to not notice it)
http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download/
The other aspect that I recently learned about is that our brain as a limited processing speed, in everyday situation we dont notice it so we think we can just process everything we see as a matter of fact, but the faster you go in a car its not simply that you field of vision narrow because things are moving fast but also the more your field of vision becomes a rougher-and-rougher-guestimate-of-what-might-have-been-there-on-the-previous-second. That and the change blindness can mean that while driving you can potentialy not see something thats right in front of you before you smash into it.
It makes me think of an acount of a driver that had driven off a road that had previously collapsed after a huge land slide, he said something like 'I was driving and suddently I saw that something was wrong but could not figure out what, there was no road anymore in front of me but it was so unexpected and outlandish that is seamed unreal I could not understand what was going as I was flying in mid air(diving)'. So in addition to not noticing there was no road anymore, his brain template had nothing to compare that new situation with (equivalent of 'does not compute').
September 19th, 2007, 11:27 AM
Definitely not. And neither should you. Here are a series of good reasons:
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/do-yo...see-14026.html
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/resul...see-14060.html
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/visua...ium-14227.html
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/my-fa...ion-14077.html
Could we say that we are a prisoner of our own primative senses? Do we have more than five senses? If you take away your sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing and seeing could you comprehend the world around you at all? I believe you would, but it would be completely different, something we can not comprehend because of our current senses. But will we ever know? Maybe someday. =P
I love questions like this
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