Re: <documenta X><blast>
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Tue, 22 Jul 1997 12:01:59 -0400
for all the discussion of what the mind is doing, we've had almost nothing
specific about neuroanatomy or cognitive science. Ultimately, it is hard to
get around the mountain that there's a "brute reality" out there, but
"experienced reality" is an extremely artifical, processed model of brute
reality. One can honestly say that all human experience is virtual, it is
an artificial construct.
The is no such thing as objectivity, and as long as you have to process
reality with a brain, there never will be. For example, a seemingly direct
experience of hearing is anything but. The auditory system is in fact a
dual system that, depending on which of the two paths are under
consideration, flows from the eighth cranial nerve (which it shares with
the vestibular system, another sensory modality that appears to have shared
a close evolutionary kinship with hearing, but now serves fuctions of
balance and orientation in space, as well as other subtle, higher level
modulations of "what reality is") through the trapezoid body, the olivary
nucleus, the inferior colliculus, the lateral geniculate nucleus (I think,
perhaps the medial geniculate nucleus) and then onto a pattern recognition
matrix in the auditory cortex... but naive experiece is that "I heard "x",
therefore realty is "x")... vision, what seeing is, makes hearing look
simple, only when the striate cortex in the back of the brain has done some
initial signal processing, visual perception tasks are distributed to
something like 35 specific regions of the brain before the world can be "seen".