Quote Originally Posted by StephL View Post
But I wonder - are you always sure what is what?
Do you have a "only pure reality NOW" switch, or is there a sort of a constant incertitude about what you perceive, and it´s actual physical correlates?
Actually what we "see" is never an exact representation of the physical correlates. Our eyes are like cameras sending 2D images to the visual cortex where they split into parts like lines and circles, then goes through a kind of rendering pipeline, a bit like how a computer game is rendered, that constructs a 3D image, part of this process is pattern recognition, which includes comparing the seen patterns to memories of already seen objects, this not only makes you recognize objects, but is helps determine how the constructed 3D image that the your consciousness perceives should be like, based on your memories and experiences. The more ambiguous something you see is, or the less data the input contains, the more prone you are to the brain filling in more details with what whatever the pattern recognition systems thinks stuff should be, I think that consciously thinking about objects might be able to skew the pattern recognition process towards whatever object(s) you're thinking about.