I’m collecting here some resources on this topic (perception and sensory input) that I’ve come across lately. Stand by for some better order and presentation.
OK, I’m starting with the better thing. Today some accident took me to the Yanni-Laurel social media sensation. Here’s an article on Slate, dated May 15, 2018, for background. You can skip the article and go direct to the puzzle here.
How can there be such a vast difference between the sounds of the words people hear from the same source at the same time?
How can we know if one hearing is more accurate than another when there is no consensus? And is there a way of checking consensus hearing for accuracy? That is, is there a way of determining what this sound “actually” is, regardless of what the consensus might be?
Ted Talk by David Eagleman –
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans/transcript
In this talk, and in more detail in the New Yorker article linked below, we discover that people can learn to hear and see by means of prostheses that convert sound or light to other, different sensations. People can hear when sound is converted to bumps in their back and they can see that way too. Also they can see when a video camera’s output is converted to sound in their ears or sensations on their tongue.
And here is a New Yorker article on the same topic. Great detail. Includes more prostheses than Eagleman and ESPECIALLY several personal testimonies as to how it sounds, looks, feels to use a sensory-substitute prosthesis.
So what is it really, to see or hear when we can use prostheses to allow vision by sound or back bumps or a lolipop of taste/tongue sensations? Or to allow hearing by back bumps or cochlear implant? I mean, what is it that we are really seeing or hearing? (I’m thinking perception is the mind’s noticing information, and that would be awareness or consciousness.)
And where is the information that is perceived? In the brain or in the thing heard or seen? If the information is not noticed by someone, is it anything other than an abstraction? Perhaps a series of numbers?
So does something exist if it is present only as information?
Always astonishing synchronicity brought me at the same time I was learning about Yanny and Laurel to a scientific experiment that appears to demonstrate that, yes, something as complex as HIV DNA molecules in physical form can be converted to memory in water and exist only as memory. (But memory is a human metaphor when we are talking about water. Less poetically, we would say information.) The memory in the water can then be listened to and recorded from the water in the form of radio waves in the range of 2 to 3 thousand Herz, apparently excited from the memory by the Earth-ambient very low frequency radio signals. Furthermore, this “music” from the water that once had the DNA in it can be sent as a WAV file to a distant lab that can reconstitute the DNA from sterile water that has never had DNA in it by playing the music to the water for an hour.
Here is a 2014 documentary on this experiment made by France 5, that country’s PBS. It is dubbed in English.
This experiment, which has been repeated many times since 2005 and is due to Luc Montagnier, Nobel Laureate in medicine for discovering the HIV, is so strange that it needs to be restated for clarity. Notice that the Italian scientists 1500 k away from the lab that recorded the music from the water that had once had 2 or 3 nanograms of DNA in it, reconstitute the DNA only from about an ounce of their own sterile water that has listened to a six-second recording played over and over for an hour.
- In Paris, scientists put a tiny amount of DNA into about an ounce of water. The water is diluted by ten million to one and about an ounce of that water is listened to for six seconds by a very sensitive amplifier of its radio frequency emissions. And those radio frequencies are recorded to a WAV file that is sent to a lab in Italy.
- In Italy, the WAV file is played back to some lab-sterile water (that has never had the HIV DNA in it, of course) for an hour. The water listens to the music (the recorded radio frequency emissions).
- And this sterile water is treated like evidence from a crime scene, with PCR, which converts the information now in the water from its listening to the music to the same physical DNA as confirmed by Italian scientists.
Does the water listening to the music hear the DNA?
If the much-diluted water in Paris has a memory of the DNA, is it conscious?
When the sterile water in Italy acquires the memory, is it learning? Listening? Is it conscious?
Isn’t having perceptions a definition of consciousness?
Does the HIV DNA molecule or molecules we are talking about – in Paris to start with and in Italy at the end of the experiment – really exist?
(For the scientists themselves cannot hold it in their hands and see it. They can’t even see it under an ordinary light microscope – I’m not sure about an electron microscope – but I know that doing so would require destroying the DNA itself. They certainly don’t see it directly during their experiment. So they have only indirect evidence, information.)
Much thinking about these facts, or this information, is hurting my head pretty much right now. I’ve made a separate page where I’m putting my thinking: here.
