Hallucinations Are Everywhere (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Hallucinations Are Everywhere (2018)

theatlantic.com

80 pointsflannery53 comments

Sometimes I hallucinate cats, or other small animals like squirrels.

I see them from the corner of my eye, and then when I go to look at them, they aren't there.

They usually show up when I'm under stress.

I kind of like them, because they remind me to try and relax a bit more.

Most people are hallucinating anytime they open their eyes. We have blind spots where the optic nerve goes through the retina. There is no optic information due to the lack of rods/cones there, so our brain interpolates that information based on surrounding information. For this reason we don't see an empty spot in our periphery. You might have tested this effect as a kid with a paper with an X/dot on either side. When staring at the X you can see the dot "disappear" if you line things up correctly.

A neurologist (and author of Phantoms in the Brain), Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, tried to test the limits of this interpolation with test subjects with larger blindspots. He found that when looking at text, some participants found that the brain would create fake glyphs to fill in the "texture" of the text.

I get insomnia often and have found that when I am very sleep deprived those blind spots actually exhibit lag and become more detectable. This is especially noticeable when I turn my head quickly.

We are just a ghost in the machine, we do think that we have control but at all times the physical brain is in charge. Everything we are is a hallucination, our personality is just calculated sensory input and often things go wrong with that. There are a lot of outside parameters that make the process go wrong, it is a near miracle that also things go right and that there are things like synchronised collective hallucionations between multiple input/brain interactions (we call that reality). Sometimes also the physical brain gets damaged by the ghost from the inside. I have been severly depressed for years and learned the hard way about hallucinations, but learning about that and accepting the hallucination took away that depression. As far as I see it, thinking is a form of radiation inside the brain, containing particles and waves, and those waves can be disturbed very easy

So you identify with the brain?

Of course not, everybody identifies with the ghost. Although the brain is a work of evolutionary art, it's still just a dumb machine. The hallucination within is just a weird artifact of how that machine works.

Just a wave of the radiation, nothing more, nothing less.

but it is still dying. Some people identify with their political movement. Other identify with other people (Ubuntu: person living through a person). Or just simply believe in your self (all packages together).

Everything is a hallucination, since everything is an internal representation ([1] direct vs indirect realism). The real question is why do these hallucinations seem consistent enough to generate a shared world/consensus reality. I think David Pearce answers this well [2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism

2: https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-explain-the-shared-experien...

The wikipedia article you link to does not support the assertion that "everything is an internal representation", but only presents it as one view (representationalism). In fact, it explicitly says that "The main alternative to representationalism is anti-representationalism, the view according to which perception is not a process of constructing internal representations."

I also don't see any answer in the quora article to the question of why "these hallucinations seem consistent enough to generate a shared world/consensus reality". In fact, he seems to say the opposite is the case: "all worlds are private worlds".

I linked the wikipedia article to show the main two competing theories. I don't see how direct realism could possible be the case, though, given what we know about perception.

> I also don't see any answer in the quora article to the question of why "these hallucinations seem consistent enough to generate a shared world/consensus reality"

From David Pearce's answer:

"Natural selection ensures that awake world-simulations share similarities. Hence the misconception of a shared experience of external reality. It’s fitness-enhancing, but delusive."

An analogy would be each player in a game has their own map of the territory, but overtime, only the players with the maps which reflected the territory accurately enough to continue playing and succeeding in the game would exist.

That answer seems to contradict his assertion that "all worlds are private worlds", also it seems to presume that there's some way to break through the delusion (else, how would he even know there's any such thing as natural selection in external reality, or even that there is an external reality), but it's not at all clear that there is -- certainly he's made no argument to this effect in the article itself -- and were there such a way, it would also contradict the same assertion.

"all worlds are private worlds" means that all of our experience are necessarily private - I don't have access to your world simulations. The delusion is that we have access to the external world directly. So, breaking through the delusion doesn't mean gaining access to the some shared, public world, it's a recognition that such access is impossible.

In that case, how does one get access to the external world?

One can make inferences based on sensory input and a nervous system attuned to the environment over millions of years of evolutionary shaping.

That already presumes a world view in which there is an external world or environment in which we're in, that we have senses through which we get input from that world.

But since all of that is outside our experience (since the model you're arguing for is that we don't have direct access to the external world), the question of how you arrived at that world view remains.

The lack of direct access to the external world (if there is one), seems to me to be a hard barrier through which I see no way of breaking, as no matter what you sense, intuit, or think, they are all compatible with any number of ways the external world could be -- such as you're insane, hallucinating, deceived, brain injured, mind controlled, etc, and there's no way to get outside your experience and compare whatver you've concluded, sensed, or believe with what actually is the case.

No amount of collaboration or cooperation with others can get you to get at the external world (again, assuming it exists) either, since whatever interactions you have with others is through your own experience, and the same objections regarding their presumed input applies.

Natural selection, combined with a limited number of ways of fitting all the observations together into one or even a few coherent wholes means the representation correlates well enough with the external world so as to confer reproductive fitness. The agent with the representation most conducive to successfully navigating the environment, avoiding danger, and reproducing passes on the genes which informs the next generation's representation.

It does mean however, there's always epistemic uncertainty with regards to what reality is actually like. See Kant's noumenon for further details.

Neither natural selection nor even something arguably even more fundamental like physics or chemistry can be appealed to for evidence regarding anything in the external world, for they and the observations that presumably led to them may not be from or about the external world at all. Once again, all of them could be merely hallucinations, or you could be insane, or manipulated in to thinking them, or your thinking may be impaired, etc. You or I might think they make sense, but that doesn't matter, since our beliefs about them does not in any way endow them with the power to be an accurate description of the way the external world is, nor do we have any way to check to see if that's the way the external world is.

Kant's noumenon is not merely something we are uncertain about, but something that is completely and utterly inaccessible to use, that we are hermetically sealed off from by our experience (at least from Kant's and the representationalist's point of view). Of course, you can come up with probabilities regarding some conjectures you have regarding the noumenon, but as you can never get to the noumenon there's no way to test or verify them, so they're completely pointless and essentially arbitrary. In any event, those probabilities (and any other thoughts you may have) are all subject to the same objections as those listed in the first paragraph, as they're all just more experience.

They can be used as evidence, though they don't definitively prove anything (Popper style). What you stated is basically post-modernism in a nut shell, but the problem with post-modernism is there's only a limited number of parsimonious explains those which can account for all observations. Everything could be brain-in-a-vat delusion, but it's not the most parsimonious explaining because it drags with it a bunch of other complications and assumptions. It's true, though, that one can only be sure of one's own existence.

Such evidence is useless, as in the brain-in-a-vat scenario (for example), this evidence could be generated by whatever controls the vat. It may have absolutely no relation to what's in the external world, and one has no way to get to the external world to verify it. Similar objections could be made based on other possible scenarios.

Furthermore, one's own reasoning capabilities might be compromised. Once again, whatever controls the vat could be making you conclude whatever they want, so whatever the evidence might be, you might be drawing the wrong conclusions from it because your reasoning capability is impaired or subverted.

As for parsimony, that's just a heuristic that's been useful to science in the world of experience (ie. the world of appearances or the phenomenal world, to use Kantian terminology). The external world is under no obligation to conform itself to it, nor to anything else that might come from or to human minds.

This is the typical philosopher going one (well, at least one) step too far. If I cut off my hand, I'll experience my hand being cut off, people will see my hand cut off and surgeons could try to stitch it back. To qualify reality as a shared illusion is fine after a night of drinking. To hold such a view in face of independent viewers perceiving essentially the same events without having to communicate is ludicrous. That perception is imperfect and that people can disagree does make a proof of delusion.

This doesn't qualify reality as a shared illusion, it qualifies our experience of it as a private illusion, with shared/overlapping characteristics. It's not the pragmatic, common-sense way of interpreting our experience of the world, but no one said the truth had to match up with pragmatics. If you think you see an error in the actual logic leading to that conclusion, please point it out, but deeming it unpragmatic (or ludicrous) isn't one.

Your hand being cut off is maybe just a convenient abstraction, imparted on us socially or genetically. We agree that it was because we roughly agree on what the essence of a hand is and what it means for it to be cut off, but that's not all there is to what happened. Similarly, that I can scrawl a few crude lines in a particular shape and have everyone agree that it looks like a face doesn't mean that it's an accurate representation or that everyone perceives the same thing. It may embody the shared essence of a face, but people will still disagree on what exactly it represents. Is it smiling or smirking? Tired or just squinting? Old or young? The devil is in the details.

Perception is as far as I know only partially based on sensory stimuli. Also important are the abstract concepts we use to make sense of the world and memories of past impressions. We might easily agree that your hand was cut off because we agree on a pretty fundamental level what these things mean, but that's not a very fine-grained description of what happened. Ask people how long it took and you'd probably find some interesting differences in perception.

There should be a distinction between sensory hallucinations and delusions. I think it is usually the latter that people are more concerned about.

I agree. I'm not sure some people understand the distinction. Hallucinations are really just the input, in this case a faulty input. Delusions are faulty conclusions. You can have delusions without hallucinations, and hallucinations can come without delusions.

Yup. And the scary thing about delusions is that often times, people under delusions are not aware of them.

I'm trying to recall this long article someone wrote. Her mother had moved her and her family to Canada for witness protection. It turned out though, the mother was under the influence of someone who was deluded into thinking they were out to get her. It took years before the author came across evidence to the contrary. Her father and her aunts were not dead after all. At which point, the person who was deluded said, oh, that's cause they had been replaced by clones.

I make a distinction here in that, I think the mother here was herself not delusional. She was influenced, and perhaps, could herself reason herself away from it given time. The person who was delusional, however, will continue to generate new explanations to fit the evidence around that delusion ... and is probably not even aware of it. According to the author, he was otherwise rational in everything else but his delusion.

I think this is the story you were after: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-42951788

(apologies if that's one of the BBC's randomly unavailable-outside-the-UK pages...)

That's the one!

I have a family member currently hospitalized again. It's very amusing to observe (and really really frustrating). He explains how he is the messiah, but that he pretends to only have the messianic complex to the shrink. No amount of reasoning can change his mind. We have to wait for the anti-psychotics to kick in.

> often times, people under delusions are not aware of them

Isn't that the required quality for it to be a delusion? The moment you realise that a thought or a perception is a delusion, it is no longer one.

Also, this is the story you're thinking of: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-42951788

That sounds reasonable.

What would you call persistent beliefs that you know are erroneous, and yet you cannot somehow shake?

I guess I'd call that cognitive dissonance.

I think "psuedo-hallucinations" is the term for the experiences of having something apparent but not believe as in an LSD trip. "Confabulation" is used for bit of information the brain constructs to give reality a cohesive quality. "True hallucination" are described as things you see and believe in that aren't there - delusion is a false belief, so a true hallucination is kind of delusion.

The article seems to talk a lot about how people hallucinate after being prompted. This is pretty directly "suggestibility tests" studied by hypnosis. How much hypnotic effects involve actual delusion and how much they involve confabulation and "going along with the situation" is a subject of debate.

Yep, all the time. Some are pretty easy to trigger consistently too; think about insects and you'll start feeling them everywhere. Ride a bus for a while or swim in a wave pool and you'll be feeling like you're moving when going to bed. Desperately try to find something you've lost and you'll start seeing it everywhere.

Some senses are way easier to fool than others. For example I hear things that aren't actually there all the time, but I don't recall ever tasting something that wasn't there. I wonder how it is with smell; I do sometimes vaguely smell things (e.g. certain kinds of food, cat pee) that I then can't find anywhere, but the nose is very sensitive to trace amounts of chemicals so there isn't really a way to verify whether what you're smelling is real or imagined in that case.

I've heard voices for as long as I can remember but immediate link most people jump to with psychosis meant I never told anyone until I was in my 30s. Only when I heard, I think, a RadioLab episode where they mentioned somewhere around one in ten do did I think that maybe I'm not teetering on madness.

It happens whenever I manage to stop thinking, which isn't often. This makes two things incredibly difficult - getting to sleep and meditation. Getting to sleep I've pretty much nailed thanks to melatonin and Radio4 through some speakers under my pillow. Meditation though I've pretty much given up on - the second I manage to reach any kind of meditative state I hear snippets of speech which _always_ kicks my brain into thinking about what the voice just said. I feel like I haven't actually relaxed in 40 odd years.

So now that you're no longer keeping it completely private, have you spoken to a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist about it? It sounds like it's caused you a lot of strife for a long time.

> Only when I heard, I think, a RadioLab episode where they mentioned somewhere around one in ten do did I think that maybe I'm not teetering on madness.

I'm obviously not your doctor, but whatever is happening to you so much that you haven't been able to relax in 40 years probably doesn't happen to 1 in 10 people. Certainly not to the degree that you describe. ”This one time this thing happened” isn't the same as "I can't sleep because of the voices". But anyway, maybe the whole world is teetering on madness.

I once worked three days straight finishing a manual and started to see small dinosaurs around the office. My girlfriend drove 65 miles to keep me company when she heard about it.

What distinguishes a hallucination from a perception of a real thing? I'm hoping it's not simply the criteria of "anything without a rational explanation is a hallucination"

Also, if people hallucinated all the time, I'd think there'd be a LOT more accidents on the road!

Ironically, one of the best ways to explore this is through altered states of consciousness, such as through psychedelics, or through various forms of meditation. It's in those altered states that you can experience just how much normal perception results from interpretation layered on top of sensory cues. For example, it is possible to become aware of the exact sensation of pain. The process of trying to pin down pain changes its experience (it often lessens its impact). I have heard that in extreme concentration states, pain can be perceived as discrete pulses of sensation, clearly distinguishing an "echo" that fills in between pulses that makes pain appear to be a continuous sensation.

Editing of memories in neurotypical, otherwise functioning members of society happens much more frequently than we care to admit.

I definitely hallucinate when I'm tired and force myself to stay awake, some of the most intense and real feeling hallucinations I've had where during long road trips. I have yet to get into an accident yet, I don't know how.

I recently drove to Canada, I was stressed and didn't feel like going home so I just kept going and 13 hours later I was being interrogated by 5 guys tearing my car apart looking for drugs because "it's not every day we see someone drive from Virginia to Canada on a whim." I never slept a full night the whole time since I'm a student and can't really afford a hotel, I'd just pull into a gas station when I felt really tired and take a nap.

Somewhere around Pennsylvania on the way back I spent about an hour talking to my girlfriend (who was still in Virginia) on and off. Sometimes she would disappear and be replaced with my laptop bag and I'd freak out and think someone had taken her.

I'm not sure you understand, when they say "everyone hallucinates all the time" they include you and me. Those hallucinations don't have to be "big" or disruptive.

A hallucination is where your brains perception doesn't match "reality". Maybe you thought the lights flickered for a brief moment but they didn't, or may you thought you saw a shadow move.

The article explains it pretty well, it's very common with things you "expect". Such as your phone vibrating when it isn't, or after watching an insect documentary makes you feel like there's an ant on you (called Formication), or feeling a raindrop when expecting rain (only to realize your skin isn't wet).

EDIT: That is to say - hallucinations aren't usually disruptive enough to cause car accidents, most of the time we just kind of "brush it off" so to speak and forget about it.

Did anyone else follow the link to the sine wave example and clearly made out the voice on the first try? Welp no I'm concerned

I heard it. I was also primed. I read the rest of the paragraph before trying it.

I've had enough psychedelic experiences though, so maybe that is it :-)

I hadn't read forwards when I tried it and I've had no psychedelic experiences, but I heard it too. I've only ever had the "normal" hallucinations, like phone vibration or once or twice hearing someone say my name.

I also primed myself before listening to it the first time and I heard it clearly. I've never had any psychedelic experiences.

I played the recording to another person without giving them any clues. They got the second half of the sentence on the first hearing and correctly understood the whole sentence after three hearings.

Why be concerned? All audible speech is just sounds and a pattern recognizing filter.

I tried it about 8 times before I heard anything, and I only got "going to the park" before I listened to the real audio version. I also have trouble understanding people in fairly mild noise if I'm not looking at their face, so I have to wonder if those are linked somehow.

A few weeks ago, I was drifting off to sleep and heard my name being spoken. Extremely clear, and right in my ear.

It freaked me right the fuck out.

Microdosing is the best of both worlds -- you get the same focus and random insights without the hallucinations.

> If you’ve ever felt the buzz of your phone against your thigh only to realize the sensation was entirely in your head

I get what they're trying to say, but the much more plausible explanation for "phantom phone vibrations" is actual phone vibrations. There are all kinds of things, electromechanical and software, interactive and non-interactive, that cause phones to vibrate. My current phone vibrates if you look at the fingerprint unlock sensor the wrong way. An old phone of mine would vibrate and wake up the screen randomly without any visible notifications and behaved strangely for weeks after exposure to a small bit of rain. My current phone regularly flashes transient notifications (I think maybe from a Motorola app?) that are gone faster than I can read what they are. The point is that, on average, software and hardware are both basically shit and do things that they're not supposed to do all the time.

Not when there's no phone anywhere near your thigh. Have personally experienced that enough to know for sure it's a thing.

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