Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman Ep103 "Could you ever know what it’s like to be someone else?" (Part 2)
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May 5, 2025 Dive into the fascinating complexities of consciousness and the potential of brain technology to foster empathy. Explore the challenges filmmakers face in capturing another's experience, using examples from popular culture. Imagine the wild concept of becoming a horse or feeling half your brain in slumber. Reflect on how we perceive the world through different sensory inputs and the limits of truly understanding another's consciousness. Could dream celebrities take over the viral world? It's a deep philosophical dive into what it means to connect beyond ourselves.
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Story: Losing Self Becoming Horse
- A short story illustrates the problem of becoming another creature and losing the original self.
- Changing brains fully means forgetting the original identity, making true experience sharing impossible.
Vision Is Brain's Internal Model
- Conscious vision is not a direct camera feed but an internal model your brain constructs.
- This model ignores blinks, tunnels, and displays a stable, 360-degree colorful world despite limited retinal input.
Movie Scenes Misrepresent Experience
- Movies showing first-person views inside another's head get many sensory details wrong, such as blinks or world motion.
- These errors expose how actual consciousness constructs experience differently from simple filming or camera input.