Read part 2: Berit Brogaard asks, if we cannot trust our senses, where does this leave our beliefs?
All experience is the product of inference. All experience is a highly sophisticated, hierarchically interwoven story that is fabricated to explain our sensory impressions. In this view, experiences – from qualia to convictions – are basically hypotheses that are tested against sensory evidence. This ‘perception as hypothesis testing’ allows us to identify the most plausible explanation for our sensations. In this sense, experience, beliefs and hypotheses are all the same thing and only exist in our mind’s eye. They are internally consistent fantasies, generated by a fantastic organ; namely the brain. If true, there is no experience ‘out there’ and I could be a brain in vat.
The problem with this sceptical take on ‘experience as inference’ is that it presupposes the existence of a sensorium. In other words, if I am making inferences, there must be something out there to infer. More technically, the formal basis of the (essentially Helmholtzian or Kantian) notion of a fantastic organ rests upon some abstract (but relatively straightforward) maths that states the following: any dynamical system that possesses a boundary between its internal states and some external states must perform some sort of (Bayesian) inference about the external states.
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