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Friday 10 July 2015

Seeing Is Disbelieving

Life's just an illusion .... and seeing is believing, or maybe not.

Optical Illusions - Just Staring And  Perspectives Alter.
Just Stare For A Moment At Each Image ..... Perspectives Alter.

As long as men have been aware of their senses, they have noted that our senses can be fooled. For instance in 350BC, Aristotle noted that “our senses can be trusted but they can be easily fooled”.
He reported that if you watch a waterfall and then shift your gaze to static rocks, the rocks appear to move in the opposite direction of the flow of water, an effect we now call “motion aftereffect” or the waterfall illusion

Apparently, tracking the flow of the water can “wear out” certain neurons in the brain as they adapt to the motion. So when you then shift your gaze to the rocks, other competing neurons over-compensate, causing the illusion of movement in the other direction.

There is a similar effect going one when a passenger in one of two trains side by side when one pulls out of a station .... the brain can can be fooled into falsely determining which of the trains is actually moving.

In fact while philosophers have looked at the effects of the eye being fooled, conmen have also been aware of it. In fact fraudsters have been using it, almost since time began. The pea under a shell scam is possibly the oldest in the world, and relies on our brain and eyes being fooled to 'hide' a pea as the position of the shell under which its hidden is moved around the board.

Here's a few more famous ones from the web .... there are a lot more examples out there .... its a fascinating subject.

Optical Illusions The Brain and Eye Are Easily Fooled.
The Brain and Eye Are Easily Fooled.

5 comments:

  1. Illusions are not proof that ALL is imagined as some conspiracists would have us believe, they merely highlight some flaws that show up when vision is taken out of it's natural habitat, mainly 3D to 2D.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Of course it also works when the 2D encroaches on the 3D. This takes a lot more effort and skill and it's effect is limited to just one view point.

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    2. Robotics researcher Hans Moravec has speculated that we are probably already living in Virtual Reality, aka The Simulation Argument. In which case of course, then everything we see is unreal. 'You pays your money and makes your choice' as the shell and pea hucksters would say.

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    3. There's little point in denying that we are in a simulation as those who want to believe will believe, so instead here is some undeniable proof to confirm it.
      But seriously, as Dr Hunt would say, if we're in a simulation, why not a simulation in a simulation? Basically our imaginations could come up with all sorts of alternative realities - each one as theoretically possible as the next and just like religions they can't all be true and most likely, none of them are.

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    4. Well photo-shop is a wonderful deceiver of the eye (and I should know), so the undeniable proof page illustrates that truth at least.

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