
Vision Experiment Resolved a Centuries-Old Philosophical Debate - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/this-vision-experiment-resolved-a-centuries_old-philosophical-debate
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throwaway316943
This is a garbage article. I’m sure the research has some merit but it is not
explained here. What do they even mean by saying when you look at a manhole
cover from a few feet away you see it as circular instead of an ellipse? I see
an ellipse. It doesn’t get transformed into a circle. What on earth are they
on about?

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fjdjsmsm
I believe what they mean is that you know the manhole is a circular object
seen at an angle, rather than an ellipse shaped hole.

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pontifier
I'm of the opinion that our eyes extend our brain, and we actually use the
external world as working memory to some extent.

The evidence I have is the dramatic drop in perception quality when my eyes
are closed. Even though my minds eye is exceptionally vivid, there are
differences when visual data is not available.

3d stereo reconstruction of surfaces is one area that is greatly hindered.
When my eyes are open, saccades cause waves of stereo correlation to pass over
an object revealing it's surface geometry in extreme detail.

Ongoing querying of reality is useful to explain some other detail related
perceptual phenomenon.

There was also a visual perception demo I saw at OMSI a few years ago in which
a scene had objects appear and disappear. A frame of black between the changes
completely disrupted normal change detection and it was very difficult to
detect which objects changed when relying on only "visual memory".

My evidence is empirical, but I'm sufficiently convinced that our minds use
reality directly for parts of our working memory.

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fjdjsmsm
Stare at a white wall and use your minds eye to see something. Then close your
eyes and see the thing. Do you see a difference? I don’t.

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tzs
Note: if you use reader view and are puzzled why an article entitled "This
Vision Experiment Resolved a Centuries-Old Philosophical Debate" is about a
display in New York's Central Park of 3D printed statues of women scientists,
try disabling ad blocking.

On both Firefox on my Mac with uBlock Origin and Safari on my iPad with
content blockers enabled it gets the right title in reader view but sometimes
gets the body from the next article in their infinite scroll of articles.
Whether it does this seems to come and go, which suggests it is actually
caused by some ad that appears intermittently on the page.

(And on iPad, many people pretty much have to use reader view, because the
page completely ignores the user's font size setting...stepping it from 100%
to 300% causes no visible changes whatsoever on the page).

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raxxorrax
I don't see a philosophical debate answered here to be honest.

> The ramifications of this are larger than tilted coins

They always are. The coins you are currently seeing are just weighted
experience. Weighted more because of recency or other factors but in conflict
with accumulated experience. Why should they just be ignored? I would expect
more mental load.

Do we ever escape the perspective from which we view the world?

Well, we can perceive the oval shape as a circle, which would suggest that we
do it literally to some degree.

Either I don't get it, or I have another "perspective" as the author as it
seems.

> We do not see the world completely separate from our point of view

Well... but we also don't see it completely separate from objectivity if you
want to call it that.

Perhaps no philosophical debate and more a neurological one?

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tgv
> Well, when two things are more similar, it takes longer to distinguish them.

But that's not the only thing that can slow perception down; e.g. it's also
been shown that rotation slows down perception. This theory (that similarity
slows down comparison) also doesn't have any implication about the locus of
the delay: the interference in the comparison could come from anywhere in the
visual system, so it would only support the hypothesis that the tilted coin
looks more like an ellipse than a non-rotated coin.

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thom
It feels to me like being shown a similar shape (and specifically being set a
shape-based task) would explicitly reinforce the perspective-interpreted
shape, just like someone presenting you with the classic duck/rabbit image and
saying the word ‘duck’ in your ear. Therefore I’m not completely sure this
proves you would naturally hold on to that representation by default out in
the real world.

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vidanay
In other words, we although "see" in a two dimensional planar projection, we
comprehend our environment in a 3D rationalized world. The article seems
pretty esoteric to me.

