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there's all sorts of fascinating experiences you can have that are… sort of sensory experiences, except they're impossible to achieve with actual sensory input, and can only happen inside your brain by creating the illusion of actual senses
here's the one that prompted this tweet: if your brain is wired up like ours is, and you've spent a long time watching english-subtitled anime, you can “imagine” a character speaking in japanese, with japanese mannerisms, but with primary informational content somehow in english
like, you “hear” someone speaking in japanese, with a very familiar, incredibly japanese tone of voice and prosody and so on, with perhaps bits and pieces of actual spoken japanese in there, but you “process” what they are saying as if it's in english, because it mostly is
this is quite a fragile illusion and works best if you do in fact have some competency in japanese, if you're very, very, very familiar with a particular character's voice, and if you… are relaxed enough to not try to pick apart what you're experiencing
highly relevant image
now i know what you're thinking: “what do you mean you can't do this with real sensory input, couldn't you just layer english subtitles over completely unrelated japanese audio?”
nope! we speak japanese too well for you to be able to get away with that for any length of time
the illusion only works inside our head because there isn't real sensory input that could contain such an obvious contradiction. there is just the sensation of “japanese voice of [character name]”, “person speaking japanese”, and the imagined result of processing that “input”
it's basically a type of magic trick, it only works so long as you can direct the viewer's attention. human sensory processing does not actually perceive 100% of the world 100% of the time, it doesn't even get anywhere close. it's more like 1%, and you infer the other 99%!
incidentally this is why ai model hallucinations fall apart when you look at them closely but can be convincing at first glance. they're doing something similar to what the human brain does.
we hope this was interesting
oh, yes, this is also why dreams tend to not make particularly much sense!
@hikari we can't maintain any depth in the illusion due to aphantasia but the illusion itself works perfectly. It's such a lovely and fascinating shape to put your language and social processing wetware in
@hikari aah
@nina_kali_nina obligatory apology for our fediverse instance being a mess and so threads end up being delivered… late, slowly, incompletely, possibly not even in order ^^;
@hikari :3 I'm thankful the threads are getting delivered at all