Originally circulated on 17 April 2020
Hi fellow Ruminants & Groupies in Lock Down
Greetings from 21 day of lock down. This week I bewail the lack of inspiration from you with no worthy submissions from any of you for Ruminant Pink Friday’s ™ Hopefully this will change.
This week I am going to focus on the fabric of reality, our personal reality and the difference between the two. If one is a stable genius then one may believe that your personal reality is the same as objective reality. Let’s start to debunk that by starting with the simple cliché that seeing is believing.
Is what we see with our own eyes objectively real? Our eyes are only a small part of creating the image we see. A significant portion of our brain is dedicated to sophisticated simulation and image processing of the information from our eyes before the three dimensional image we see is rendered by our brain. Thus people who are born blind cannot initially see properly if their eyesight is restored later in life. The brain needs to learn how to process the information from the eyes. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/people-cured-blindness-see.
So given that our brain is involved in sophisticated simulation to render the image we see let’s turn to the question of whether the image you see is objectively real. Here I will turn to a famous experiment called the invisible gorilla that many of you may be familiar with http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html.
Imagine you are asked to watch a short video in which six people, three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla? Well the results are that half of the people do not see the gorilla. Although your brain renders a complete image your brain actually uses heuristics and short cuts to render that image. Things in the periphery and not central to what you are focussing on (the ball) are not necessarily rendered and do not form part of the image you see. The simple answer is that what you see is not necessarily objectively real. This forms the topic of a book with the title, “The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways our Intuition Deceives Us” https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Gorilla-Other-Intuitions-Deceive-ebook/dp/B0036S4EYQ.
The book makes the following observations:
- honest eyewitness testimony can convict innocent defendants
- expert money managers suddenly lose billions
- Homer Simpson has much to teach you about clear thinking
I think I have just introduced the topic that forms the subject of today’s rumination but I guess that this is enough for one week. However this topic a rich seam that can still be explored in the coming weeks. Please feel free to share your ideas.
Please keep the submission ideas flowing.
Regards
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 