First published: 2016/04/28 (8 years ago) Abstract: Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain
our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science
and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be
intractable and currently mysterious. This is one of many deep problems that
are universally agreed to be beyond the current purview of Science, including
quantum phenomena, etc. But all of these famous unsolved problems are either
remote from everyday experience (entanglement, dark matter) or are hard to even
define sharply (phenomenology, consciousness, etc.).
In this note, we will consider some obvious computational problems in vision
that arise every time that we open our eyes and yet are demonstrably
incompatible with current theories of neural computation. The focus will be on
two related phenomena, known as the neural binding problem and the illusion of
a detailed stable visual world.