The Reality of Illusion

We Got it the Other Way Round

Sep 12, 2020

The Illusion

Illusions are famous amongst scientists, psychologists and researchers. They are used as examples of how our brains get things wrong or about the tricks it uses to interpret raw data. Illusions are also studied by Robotics and AI engineers to better understand how to build advanced machines of the future.

Take for example this famous color/shade illusion:

The question is, are A and B the same shade or are they different?

Scroll Down…. Only after you have had a good look…

I remember when I first saw this illusion in a book about the visual system.

It’s unbelievable!

Here is the Solution:

A and B really are the same shade!

Try as hard as you can to erase the fact from illusion. Whatever I do, I can’t.

This is a fantastic example of the methods (or tricks) used by the visual system to understand the world.

There are 2 mainstream ways of looking at this.

1. Your visual system is wrong. A and B are the same shade and you have been duped, by mistaken machinery inside your head, to observe the difference. The light coming in to the eyes is of the same frequency and intensity, period.

2. Your visual system is very clever. A and B are indeed the same shade but in the context of the picture there is a checkered grid with a shadow cast by a green cylinder. The visual system guesses that all the squares on the checkered grid must be of a uniform pattern and adds the effect of the shadow to make it so.

In either case Reality is considered Real and what you observe subjectively is an “accident” of the visual system.

I am beginning to question this paradigm.

What is Colour?

We’ve all learnt that light comes in different frequencies on the Spectrum of the Electromagnetic Field. There is a particularly thin sliver of frequencies within which visible light falls. We can’t see radio, ultraviolet or anything beyond them. Red is at the lower end of the frequency band and Blue at the higher. White light a happy mixture of the above, and the Black is an absence of light. The Greys represent different quantities / intensities of White light. The White has more light, and the Grey less.

This light then “hits” the cones (color sensors) and rods (low light sensors) in the Eye, which transmit “electrical pulses” down the nerves connected to the visual system in the Brain.

Your brain, a glorified and pompous machine, then does some “information processing” and voila, we have Sight!

This is all wonderful but you didn’t come here for a science lesson. However, I had to set the stage for we have to question what is really happening…

The frequencies themselves are not colour.

Else perhaps you would be able to see sound (also a wave) or hear light. There are some tedious arguments (and evidence) around this but I am writing a short article, not a philosophical treatise. So I will allow the reader to pose his/her own arguments and think them through.

So far so good.

I think the ultimate way to think about this is the “Brain in a Vat” thought experiment.

Again I am not going to explain this further. Look it up in google or whatever if you really need to, let save reading time!

Finally, it’s all just Encoded Electric Signals, that when connected to the “right part” of the Brain creates our subjective experience. In the example above, if I connected the sound electrodes to the seeing part of the brain. That brain should see sound!

It still doesn’t explain what colour is though… and this is called the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”.

Ok. Let’s move on… I want to ask the question in an other way.

What Makes Reality Real?

This is a surprisingly simple question with an enormously complex set of answers that not many can find agreement or certainty.

It’s got something to do with Independence, Invariance and Shared Experience.

Let’s take the Moon for example:

(Einstein liked the Moon and Vikid thinks highly of himself )

It’s independent from me. I go to bed at night and it apparently continues to orbit the Earth. My parents also assure me the moon was there before my birth.

We also all share the Lunatic experience. Even when we’re not looking directly, we can set a camera upon it and we all agree the moon is there, at the same location at the same time with the same properties.

We can trace the history of the moon across all time. Long after the Moon has been swallowed by the sun. Its atoms, the light that reflected of its surface, its gravitational reverberations etc… will be in the Universe. Same goes before the Moon was formed. So it’s permanent.

These ideas can be made more concrete with the ideas of symmetry and invariance under various transformations if we want to be scientifically rigorous. Let’s skip that malarky for now and just accept the simple facts.

This brings us to a famous Zen Koan.

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Which really brings us to the point, because there will be a vibration of air molecules, if we accept reality is real but there will no sound.

Sound only happens in Consciousness.

Similarly what we observe as light, it’s color, brightness etc… only occur in consciousness.

There is no light out side of it!

So what is real?

In some sense, all perception is an illusion. Every electrical impulse to the brain has to necessarily be interpreted and interpretation is an open question.

Are A and B the same shade or not?

If interpretation is fundamental, then I would have to say “both” interpretations are equally valid.

In fact the naive “same frequency/intensity” interpretation may have less validity.

Clearly, A and B are a different shade!

Let’s drive this point home. You sit on your couch with your cat and listen to

“Shape of you” by Ed Sheeran.

You hear music and a wicked beat. You get an highly interpreted version and you wonder about Ed’s bedsheets…

Some kid sitting deep in the jungles of Borneo, knows nothing of bedsheets but probably gets the beat.

That cat gets a cacophony. Your cat hears sounds only.

Is the music an illusion? Or is it the main fucking point?

We could go on for a long time. There are various arguments made and fought by people far more intelligent than me for the last few centuries but I have to conclude on the level that matters to us…

Our Interpreted Consciousness is Reality.

The Wave Frequency argument is the “accident”.

Not the other way round.

And that’s,

The Vikid Truth

The Vikid Truth