Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

by Beau Lotto

The only way to know if your perception of the physical world is accurate is if you’re able to directly compare your perception to the underlying truth of reality. This is the way some artificial intelligence (AI) systems work. They are inherently “religious” because they need a godlike figure—the computer programmer—to tell them whether their outputs are correct or not, and then they incorporate this new information into future responses. But the human brain doesn’t function like this. We resemble “connectionist” AI systems that don’t have a godly programmer and thus never get information about the world directly. Instead, these systems modify and multiply their networks’ structures randomly. Those that change in a “useful” way survive and are therefore more likely to reproduce in the future.