Virtual touching of a virtual body part generates a real sensation of touching

This post was inspired by a highly interesting finding related to an experiment in which the subject person creates a virtual sensory input to a virtual hand that represents her own hand. The popular article is here and the original article “Phantom touch illusion, an unexpected phenomenological effect of tactile gating in the absence of tactile stimulation” of Pilacinski et al can be found here.

It was found that the virtual touching of the virtual hand creates a sensation in the corresponding body part of the subject person, say forearm. This occurs even if the person does not see the corresponding virtual body part. This suggests that more than visual cues are needed.

Consider first the TGD inspired view of sensory perception (see for instance this and a HREF= “https://tgdtheory.fi/pdfpool/emotions.pdf”>this).

1. Sensory data at sensory organs is very fuzzy and the building up of sensory experience by pattern completion and recognition is almost a miracle. The process building sensory perception consisting of standard mental images must involve virtual sensory input to sensory organs, in particular eyes.
2. The sensory input would be communivated from sensory organ to cortex as dark photons (decaying to biophotons) with light velocity along flux tubes parallel to axons. From the cortex a signal to the MB would be sent. After that MB would make a guess about the final sensory perception very different from the actual sensory input. This guess must generate at sensory organs a diffuse sensory signal and must be compared with the diffuse sensory input.
3. This is achieved if the first guess generates a virtual sensory signal with a reversed arrow of time propagating to the sensory organs and becoming a diffuse sensory input at the sensory organs. The usual sensory processing in the brain would take place but in the opposite time direction. When the difference between virtual and real signal is small enough, the process stops.

Note that the original model assumed that the virtual signal corresponds to the final percept but this is not the case for this variant of the model and ZEO becomes an absolutely essential element of the model.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.