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Showing posts from September, 2007

"Conscious Realism" and "Multimodal User Interface" theories

I recently sent an email to Donald Hoffman , professor at the University of California, Irvine, with kudos for his book, Visual Intelligence , which has had a profound impact on my thinking about perception. Understandably, he's very busy kicking off the new school year, so I was grateful that he sent at least brief response and a reference to his latest published paper, titled Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem . Naturally, I was eager to read it. Much of the study of how human consciousness arises stems from the assumption that consciousness is a product of physical processes; that consciousness is a product of a physical processes in the brain. This paper starts from the opposite assumption: that "consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world." When I read this in the abstract, I must have largely ignored its significance. Having read Visual Intelligence , I'm familiar with Hoffman's focus on