We do not experience the world, only our reaction to it.
Examples: Nervous systems do not store “ball” or “sound”, they encode the physiological responses to those stimuli which are constructed into objects via downstream processing. This bridges the “stimuli == memory == behavior” conceit.
How do sensory illusions work? Oh wow, the thing where our brains fix messed up words without being “aware” of it? It’s a stimuli match thing. We don’t see “words” directly, we build stimuli responses into larger objects, and if they are a “close enough” match, they trigger the same behavioral response as the actual target. Wow.
This is the core of the differentiating – integrating mechanic apparent in cognitive function, differentiate stimuli into “memory”, integrate “memory” into “behavior”.
Our “phenomenological” experience is literally just the sum of our prior experience. Children do not form a “phenomenological” experience/”consciousness” until sufficient stimuli experience has been accumulated.
Exposure to a wider range of stimuli modifies the phenomenology of “consciousness”. (This is kind of surprising, and provides a testable point, and implies that social mechanics work to restrict this)
Is the primary driver of rural “brain drain” stimulus based? Can we find homogeneous urban cultures to compare against homogeneous rural cultures? Is the Flynn effect an artifact of increased access to diverse stimuli?
This is all just completely mind blowing. So I’m completely “aphantastic”, I have zero internal sensory experience when recalling information of any kind. And it’s always blown me away that apparently most people get a full “sensory” recall when recalling information, they see it as if it was “real”, they smell it as if it were in front of them.
It’s such an obvious hallucination that should be overridden fairly easy, but that doesn’t seem to occur in ventral dominant folks at all. It’s a pervasive part of the human experience for most people.
The thing that has always stuck with me is how people describe these experiences, the context is always so narrow compared to the root sensory environment the experience was acquired in.
Sensory memories like this almost always invoke a physiological component, a feeling about them. It’s that triggered behavioral response that I’m very fascinated in.
Alternative mechanic – What if a small percentage of individuals (perhaps the foundation of the dorsal/ventral split) do actually respond directly to stimuli, without falling back to a behavioral context? A world where everything is made up on the fly in real time? These individuals could not “experience” things internally the same way because they access “raw” stimuli reactions rather than the “processed” stimuli reactions along the ventral side?
Does the dorsal/ventral split along each functional module impart the strength of “internal experience” which relies on that functional module? How do variations in morphology and circuit order effect this?
It’s been awhile since I mentioned the “autism” model which is one of the tools I use to filter most neuroscience work through. The conceit of the model is that “autism” as is currently defined is such perfectly heterogeneous bullshit, that research into the topic does a better job of reflecting the full range of human phenotypical expression than “non-disordered” research does.
It’s a great excuse to explore the boundaries of human expression that ordinarily we’d never get the funding to do since governments tend to fairly obsessive about the “disease/disorder” conceit.
So this section will contain my observations through the “autism” model.
I’ve been having quite a bit of fun going through various sensory illusions and sub 300ms response work, and man does this conceit seem to explain a lot.
Generally, there are four major phenotypical classifications of “autism” before it got smeared together into the “spectrum” paste. The split for them, three of the four, all align with “reduced ability to write stimuli responses”, and one correlates with “too much ability to write stimuli reponses”.
Boo, accidentally deleted links. Will add them later.