Subjective Conscious Reality as Inner Mental Projections

Anil Seth on TED see via

https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality

What is imagination made of? We encourage children to play pretend, so what are their brains doing during these times & why are adults discouraged from day dreaming or going bonkers? Are we encouraging kids to hallucinate while they are awake? When adults do this we say they have "gone mad", but does that even make sense? 

What is lucid sanity consisting of? What does it mean to have a Sound Mind legally? Perhaps all people are mentally ill in their own special way, if you will, as a thought experiment. 

Do you wonder why the themes of your dreams relate to things you have been thinking about for the last few months? 

How about this, how does your brain figure out what to remember or what to forget? 

Many movie directors have a kind of psychotic mind, where their dreams merge with the way they make the movies. Blending of REM with waking reality inner mental projections of sensory signals from our eyes & ears & proprioception, smell, taste, aroma, etc means that we actually hallucinate our waking impression of reality in the working memory of our brain that floats in cerebral spinal fluid in a bone encased skull container.

Our brain is a 3lb universe, capable of REM dreaming completely realistic such that people only realize it was dream upon waking up & realizing something was different.

Noting that your brain + a computer = a composite information system or tertiary digital self.

Interestingly most analog circuits are still hand designed.

Our brain neurons are analog biochemistry gate potential axion dendritic networking with recursive looping, such that you can probably hear songs you listened to previously echoing around in your mind, randomly at different times day

Your self, you're the lead character in your inner movie projector. Your brain is a prediction engine. You try to make sense of streams of electrical impulses from sensory organs that take signals from the world, light, sound, chemical or otherwise. The brain does not see, hear, or smell or taste, it just collects streams of electrical impulses from our senses. Thus a person creates an inner controlled hallucination that comprises their waking sense of reality, though this also very active like waking reality during REM dreaming and can seem just as real as reality or more real. 

Our conscious experiences constantly modified by new predictions, a kind of noise filtering, or analog to analog processing. The neurons are each a tiny machine, linked together with billions of others, like the transistors in a smartphone SOC in a way, such that how the neurons are connected making all the difference. Perception depends largely on perceptual prediction, it comes as much from the inside out as the outside in. We actively construct our sense of reality, and this is why people have bias, their brains are each unique in both structure and function, so the predictions are also slightly different, thus the inner predictive judgements we make subconsciously all the time strongly influence how we process sensory information from the world. 

Thus all people are hallucinating all the time, such as your experience of being your self. How can you be deceived about being yourself, since the experience continuous, but what about having a body, or being a body, or being the cause of things that happen in the world, or how you have changed over time from information & social interactions. The background experiences of being a self a fragile framework of thought, thus mental illness can result from subtle changes in thoughts. 

Many people with artificial limbs experience them as a part of their body after they adapt to the device. Many cleaver methods exists for simulating limbs with digitally controlled mechanisms that work with the body, to give someone locomotion walking who lost their nature leg due to accident or illness. 

Perception & regulation of the internal state of the body essential for maintaining homeostasis, such that our thinking affects our health & wellness, as these thoughts are deeply grounded in our body, since our inner experiences are very different than the external reality filled with objects. We do not perceive our organs or insides as objects until their is medical disfunction of such organs, where we start to understand them as complex cell systems in a physical shape inside us, that keeps us alive, when our heart, brain, kidney & liver work, which all depend on the same cell mechanism to keep us alive. 

With, through, and because of our physical bodies we perceive the world, using deep sensory signals from inside the body. Our experience of the world around us effectively a controlled hallucination that predicts ourselves into reality. This has tremendous implications to understand the mechanisms of depression or anxiety. We cannot simulate life on digital systems because they are not alive, and such digital systems can never be sentient the way a real living person can be. 

Each persons objective sense of reality shared with all living creatures with similar brains & same kinds of DNA & organs, eyes, ears, feelings. We are part of nature, animals, and there is nothing to be afraid of. Fear is an inner mental process and a kind of dysfunction since most fears are unfounded or without logical basis or objective fact.