So, the "filtering out of redundant/unnecessary stimuli in the brain from environmental stimuli"... the wiki suggests an analogy in the "cocktail party effect" - the way we use our hearing to pick out a single voice in a room full of voices. "Tuning in" and "tuning out" stimuli prevents overloading of irrelevant information in the brain, but doesn't necessarily mean that all of that "irrelevant" information is not processed in the background in some way.
Does that sound right?
It is a bit different. Cocktail effect means that the information is in your brain, even accessible/retrievable, it just is not pushed to the consciousness as much. However, it is more of a "deliberate choice", because you can direct your attention. So you will, e.g., pick up your name even though you did not listen in before that.
Sensory gating is on a lower level and hard to influence. Not impossible, meditation or drugs can influence it, but it is harder. Because it works more fundamental. The most easily understood example is the sensation of cloth on your skin. You have it all day long, millions of stimuli, every movement, every breath. Yet, you will not be aware of it almost all the time (unless you concentrate on it). The brain would overload if every single variation in sound around you, every climatic influence - in short, visual/acoustic/physical etc. stimuli - approached it and demanded processing time. So before being forwarded to the brain, where they are processed (which results in us becoming "conscious" or "aware" of them), these stimuli are disposed of, they just never make it from your skin to your head. And whatever does not reach your head does not "exist" because you do not know about it. (Say, a demon stood next to you but your brain considered the visual stimulus as "unimportant" and decided to filter it out, you would never become aware of that demon. - Extreme example.)
This gating (or let me say filtering) happens in multiple stages (threshold-based maybe). They also decide how the stimuli are handled - dispose or keep for a while in case they are actually needed, so they can be handled later. I am not sure how this is decided, maybe based on available processing power. If you are idle the brain can cope with more but if you are, e.g., in battle and you are hit you will not notice the pain because it is filtered out (due to the brain being overloaded and attending the more important stimuli).
I know little about how the filters decide (I forgot if I knew).
Yes, this does sound like a possible explanation of the fade! I wonder if there can be a happy compromise, in that this "collective consciousness" of the fade isn't so much a separate realm, as it is the vast quantity of otherwise "irrelevant environmental stimuli" of the world around us that we "tune in to" under certain circumstances (e.g. dreaming).
If you care for it, I made a series of posts about this (a tiny debate with flabbadance). But flabba did not really understand what I tried to say so maybe I expressed myself... sub-optimally.
Collective consciousness is a bit different though (see what I said to Colonel earlier). Sensory gating would rather mean: The Fade is all around us, always, but we do not know because our filters block it out. Only those who can lower their filtering (magic, concentration etc.) can see, and hence, interact with it. So, yes, dreaming might account for lowering our filtering abilities, thus opening our minds for the Fade.
(I now imagine Envy existing as this unpercievable thing in the corner of our eyes but never taking form - and choosing to seep into "perceived" existence by oozing into the Inquisitor's brain (yuck)!)
Yes, this is pretty close to what it would be like.
Sorry, I just realised there might be a clash in our thinking! "Decoupling classes of cognitive process" was me literally applying Cartesian dualism to the existence of a mind and madrar's "fade-shadow". Causality between mental state and physical event is no less obscure to me than two physical events (brain to limb, for example), since nobody can actually explain what causality is.
But! I realise how this can not be true for working psychologists. Today I studied a guy called J. Fodor, who recounts in The Mind-Body Problem the history of modern psychology in an attempt to explain why we might have differences in views:
The human body is too complex to actually distinguish. Only these sensory gates alone are a complex construct of body and brain, we do not really know how it works. It is very difficult to tune the body, simply say "pop that pill and it will do A", because it might also do B and C and D. And because we only assume but cannot be sure, we sometimes miss and people pop stuff and.. yeah, you know. I have a hard time separating single processes from others. You will see that very clearly when looking at how drugs influence the mind and whole body.
However, I have never practiced. I did study psychology, but I also studied other subjects and I am not working in that area. So my knowledge might be a tad outdated (or I don't know the newest findings). So whatever I say, take it with a bit of caution.
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