Mostly philosophical topics, especially pertaining to the philosophy of mind.
Wednesday, 23 October 2019
Perceptual illusions show our minds construct reality
via GIPHY
This is Richard Wiseman. He's a skeptic of the paranormal. I think he's especially fond of perceptual illusions as they show how easily people are fooled. The message he's essentially trying to convey is: 'you think you've seen something weird? Look at how easily we're fooled!'
Perhaps so. But I think it also shows that we might sometimes be unable to see the unusual and anomalous in our visual fields. Allow me to explain.
We don't just passively see what's out there. All the light that enters our eyes simply gives us a flat 2 dimensional plane of various shades of colour. However, we seem to immediately see a 3D world with objects at various distances. How so?
The answer is that it's derived from our familiarity with the world. In our experience of reality, familiar objects have certain sizes and a certain appearance. The mind uses this background experience to quite literally construct what we see out there. So, even though only a 2 dimensional plane of colour is actually immediately given, we seem to see directly a world in 3D -- a world populated with familiar objects at various distances.
To reiterate, this construction crucially depends on what we're used to seeing. Hence, when we introduce an anomalous object such as an unusually large-sized drinking glass, our minds will be wanting to see it as a normal-sized glass. So, they will be a propensity to see the glass closer and smaller than it really is. However, other cues in the environment normally alert us that what we are seeing is an anomalously large version of a familiar object. But here, in this gif, those other cues are absent, so we naturally see it as a normal-sized glass that is closer than it actually is.
But, what's interesting is that if we were to see something unfamiliar to us, something we've never seen before, there will be a propensity to see it as something more familiar. The upshot of all this is that there might be more unusual and anomalous phenomena out there than we suppose, but we just can't see it.
I suspect it might also have implications for what we appear to see during something like a near-death experience. If our vision in an afterlife realm works anything like normal vision, then our minds with their implicit expectations will shape and mould what we actually perceive.
A similar post by me written a few years ago: Are Perceptual illusions always necessarily illusions?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why are people so certain there's no soul or an afterlife?
Are we essentially souls and will our souls continue on after we die? Both from a philosophical perspective and by virtue of all the evidenc...
Popular Posts
-
All 29 essays from the 2021 BICS essay contest that have been awarded a prize are now available to download and can be read for free from he...
-
Note: This response is approximately 13,000 words long. I have a shorter version of approximately 5,000 words that I have called A Review ...
-
Introduction This is the first part of an intended series of posts addressing alleged problems with the concept of reincarnation. Perhaps ...
-
The falsifiability criterion was advanced by Karl Popper to demarcate scientific from non-scientific theories. The idea is that if one has...
-
I read the following article two days ago: Can We Explain Near-Death Experiences? The author concludes that, " NDEs are probably caused...
-
At the outset I need to stress that I specifically have in mind the reductive materialism that has prevailed in the West since the birth of ...
-
Consciousness is necessarily causally efficacious It is widely believed by scientists and philosophers, and even the scientifically educa...
-
As a preliminary, I should point out that I haven't watched this series of programmes, nor have I read the book that the series is based...
-
The following essay is essentially an expanded and updated version of a previous blog post I've written called: Why are we all so convi...
-
Introduction: I read the following article: Why Parapsychological Claims Cannot Be True It says: The entire field [of parapsychol...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments must relate to the blog post or they will not be published.