The Doors of Perception

Full Title or Meme

What we humans can see is only a very low resolution view of reality.

Context

• William Blake

  “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

• David C. Knill and Alexandre Pouget [http://hughchristensen.co.uk/papers/The%20Bayesian%20brain.pdf The Bayesian brain: the role of

uncertainty in neural coding and

computation]

Humans and other animals operate in a world of sensory uncertainty. Although introspection tells us that perception is deterministic and certain, many factors contribute to limiting the reliability of sensory information about the world – the mapping of 3D objects into a 2D image, neural noise introduced in early stages of sensory coding, and structural constraints on neural representations and computations (e.g. the density of receptors in the retina). Our brains must effectively deal with the resulting uncertainty to generate perceptual representations of the world and to guide our actions.

References

• On this wiki Bayesian Identity Proofing speaks to the many instances where some entity on the internet needs identification of the party that is trying to initiate an interchange. By identification we mean the collection of identifiers, attributes, behaviors and inferences that are likely to be collected by any Web Site,