Mysteries of Visual Experience

Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable and currently mysterious. This is one of many deep problems that are universally agreed to be beyond the current purview of Science, including quantum phenomena, etc. But all of these famous unsolved problems are either remote from everyday experience (entanglement, dark matter) or are hard to even define sharply (phenomenology, consciousness, etc.). In this note, we will consider some obvious computational problems in vision that arise every time that we open our eyes and yet are demonstrably incompatible with current theories of neural computation. The focus will be on two related phenomena, known as the neural binding problem and the illusion of a detailed stable visual world.

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