General The McGurk Effect

Fascinating stuff!! Seeing is never believing
http://www.optillusions.com/

 

But that would be relying on a sense we have just established you can't trust. In fact can you trust any sense

 

Ahhhhh.....but its about knowing when to trust the senses.
Differentiating hallucinations are a prime example!! If we let our senses mislead us and control us, they leas us astray :blinkingkudi:

 

Sorry about the late reply. Life has been a bit hectic lately! This started out as a lighthearted exchange and somehow became more serious!!

I am not a philosopher but relate everything to the real world around me. I am primarily a clinician. Senses are super important. I work with people who are blind and partially sighted. Ask anyone who has lost their sight and they will tell you how important the senses are! However, they will also tell you how discerning you have to be about the senses. People who lose sight later on in life often suffer from Charles-Bonnet syndrome, a condition that causes visual hallucinations. These can be quite scary until the patient is able to discern that they are not real but are a response to sight loss. They can seem quite real. Schizophrenia is characterised by hallucinations (from any sense) that seem very very real and therefore can have scary and serious consequences therefore what you said here doesn't hold:

If this was the case, medication would not be prescribed to control these hallucinations. If this was the case we wouldn't teach people with Charles-Bonnet syndrome to differentiate real from hallucination! When I said astray I had schizophrenia in mind. These hallucinations seem very real to the patient so although they originate in the brain, the patient interprets them as coming from the senses. According to your theory it seems the perception is what matters. The emotional response comes later but if you know the perception is false then that will change how you react to that hallucination and from a real world perspective that is vital.

Charles-Bonnet does not support believing is seeing as they are seeing but know it is not real!

From a physiological point of view, senses are a combination of the sensory organ and brain. If you have a functioning eye for example but the visual cortex in the occipital lobe is damaged, the result is blindness. Likewise, if you have a dysfunctional eye but intact visual pathway to the brain the result is blindness. Therefore you cannot separate them. This is why childhood blindness cannot be corrected even if the physiological problem of the eye is corrected or compensated-it is too late for the pathway to the brain to develop. The computer chips and other cures reported on the news will only ever allow those patients to make out shapes and possibly colour, not the same detail we can see.

Interesting conversation! The difference between philosophy and clinical observation :thumbsuppp: