The brain can be accurately described as a hallucination engine. Its perceptual and cognitive processes are generative. The generated representations stay coupled to reality by sensory input during most normal waking experience, but the vividness of dreams, imagination, and hypothesis formation are pretty clear indicators of the strongly generative algorithm. The fact that anyone will reliably hallucinate from lack of sleep as well as hallucinogens adds evidence.
The non-cofnitive hallucinations in belief space are what make people think they’ve directly experienced the reality of spiritual truths. The feeling of presence of another mind or another space is just another hallucination, but people take that felt certainty as evidence of their reality.
The brain can be accurately described as a hallucination engine. Its perceptual and cognitive processes are generative. The generated representations stay coupled to reality by sensory input during most normal waking experience, but the vividness of dreams, imagination, and hypothesis formation are pretty clear indicators of the strongly generative algorithm. The fact that anyone will reliably hallucinate from lack of sleep as well as hallucinogens adds evidence.
The non-cofnitive hallucinations in belief space are what make people think they’ve directly experienced the reality of spiritual truths. The feeling of presence of another mind or another space is just another hallucination, but people take that felt certainty as evidence of their reality.