Conversation with Gemini: The Constructed Nature of Reality

Ken: It seems to me that not only is time a mental construct — as neuroscience suggests — but our entire notion of reality is a mental construct.

Gemini: That’s a profound insight, and it aligns with a major current in neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy.

Our experience of reality is not a direct window onto the world. It’s an internal construction — a functional simulation generated by the brain. Here’s why:

1. Filtered Senses:
   Our senses don’t deliver an unedited feed of the external world. They filter and translate it.

(a) The eyes detect only a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum.

(b) Raw data (photons, vibrations, pressure) become electrical signals — the only language the brain understands.

2. Perception as Inference (“Controlled Hallucination”):
The brain actively generates a coherent world from ambiguous signals, guided by prior experience.

(a) It uses Bayesian inference — combining past knowledge with incoming data to make its “best guess.”

(b) As Anil Seth puts it, consciousness is a “controlled hallucination” — controlled by sensory input, hallucinated by predictive generation.