Why do we experience optical illusions like the necker cube?

Why do we experience optical illusions like the necker cube?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight
youtu.be/1IqXyu14kpY?t=43m
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only sub 150 IQ brainlets "experience" optical illusions

Because the 2d rendition is indeed ambiguous. It doesn't even qualify as an optical illusion.

Because from everyday experience we pattern match the shape to an actual cube. In reality, the figure is projected on a 2d plane, so the angles aren't right and mess with your perception that is a cube.

okay, then i'll give you a real illusions guys.

eh, nevermind theres so many, i dont need to show them to you.

But my question meant to be, why do we experience illusions in general. Not just for this necker cube, but all illusions. Shouldnt we just see the world how it is?

Because the idea of "experience" being immediate or unconditioned isn't true in reality. The brain has to come up with an interpretation for sensory input before you can say you feel like you've "experienced" it, and when it does this it sometimes runs into problems like this where multiple conflicting possible interpretations exist.
See also: "blindsight," where people have eyes that work perfectly well and will avoid obstacles you place in front of them for example suggesting they have the ability to see, but they will report not being able to see anything and are apparently without any conscious access to their visual stimuli. Any behavior they exhibit in response to visual stimuli is done without their conscious knowledge, which is again more evidence that the idea of "experience" isn't the immediate / raw phenomenon we tend to think it is.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

But why does it have to interpret reality?

>multiple conflicting possible interpretations exist.

so is the brain more like a sociologist applying different theories about reality on to things (e.g. structural functionalism, neomarxism)

or is it more like a scientist with different hypotheses?

Even something basic like color can be experienced differently.
Not talking about illusions here - it seems to be cultural or language-related:
youtu.be/1IqXyu14kpY?t=43m

>But why does it have to interpret reality?
It doesn't have to interpret reality. I gave you the blindsight example where it isn't interpreting it. That's what happens when you don't interpret reality. Low level behaviors like avoiding obstacles can still happen based on uninterpretted stimuli coming through, but without the interpretation piece you won't be aware of any of it.

Im not talking about behaviour but perception. That is irrelevant and avoiding what i'm asking. Why does the brain have to make interpretations of the things that create illusions.

Because we pattern match things as a way of understanding. Illusions rely on taking something we're familiar with and twisting it in a way that's impossible. But our minds don't initially see why is different from the ordinary stuff we're used to.

Not him, but because the brain itself is theory-laden. Everything is based on receiving and processing input in such a way that the goals of being a human - having a realistic idea of the spatial surroundings, perceiving the right color of fruit, discerning different objects from one another in such a way that we can exist well in the world - has to go on under the surface, and our conscious experience is only met with this post-processed data, because if it wasn't immediately processed in such a way, it would be impossible for us to function in any sort of consistent and survivable way.

Perception IS behavior. You think I'm avoiding the question because you believe in something that isn't true, namely that perception is a raw and immediate "experience."
This is exactly why so many people mistakenly believe there's a "hard problem of consciousness." They're falling victim to the same mistaken belief you are right now.
When you "see an image," you're really engaging in sight behavior where you say and do things in reference to the abstract fiction of that "image." You're very much convinced you're definitely "seeing" it in a direct / immediate way and that this is all independent of any behavioral concerns, but that's just the trick your brain plays on you to get you to behave in that useful way where you act like explanatory narratives it feeds you are "really happening."

But why can't you just pattern match whats out there pattern for pattern? Why does there have to be twisting?

But i'm saying, why does it have to be processed. Im not concerned about what is going on consciously or unconsciously, im asking why we have to have interpretations of sensory input to function.

Why can't i have a realistic idea of spatial surroundings or discern different objects without processing or interpretation?

And btw, what did you mean by theory-laden?

Did you read the post you replied to? Because we pattern match things, we don't record every image in a unique way, we amalgamate all the similar images we've seen and derive a schemata or "pattern" that is generic enough to be useful but not vague as to give too many false positives.

I don't believe that perception is raw and immediate experience just like the illusions etc demonstrate.

I'm asking why?

So if sight behaviour is in reference to an image, why does it have to be processed. Why can't you just act directly in reference to the raw percept.

But why do we have to do this?

Because there are lots of cases where the unprocessed stimuli of the external world would be identical in two totally different situations, and unless you want to react to life threatening situations the same way as non-life threatening situations you need something extra that uses a much higher level sense of conceptual context (e.g. "I'm watching a movie and this is pretty exciting" vs. "I'm about to be mauled by a tiger in real life") to alter how you respond.

>Why can't you just act directly in reference to the raw percept.
There is no raw percept. There's unprocessed stimuli, and this unprocessed stimuli isn't anywhere near as informative as an interpreted sense of sight. You need the interpretation to be able to get a lot of the things we take for granted about the things we see around us. You can have a lower level lifeform or a robot that reacts to stimuli without any interpretation and it'll be able to do some things but will be severely lacking compared to everything we can do in navigating and manipulating the world around us based on our interpreted sense of sight.

Contextualisation makes sense. I guess sensory input is just a veil that disrupts our access to whats really out there. desu, i don't think pattern matching is good because you can view an object from infinite many angles. How can you reliably match the pattern.

You don't have to be so pedantic; raw percept, unprocessed stimuli - i mean the same thing pretty much.

But you're not explaining why this needs to happen. Why is interpretation more informative?

>raw percept, unprocessed stimuli - i mean the same thing pretty much.
It's not a pointless semantics thing, the distinction is at the heart of what you're asking about. If there were actually such a thing as "raw percepts" then it wouldn't make sense for this problem to exist in the first place, which is why it's important to make it clear that there isn't such a thing as them. Stimuli aren't perceptions. You can describe the physics of a stimulus of one inanimate structure against another with no perception involved.
>Why is interpretation more informative?
Why is there a difference between how people with blindsight behave vs. how people with normal sight behave? The answer to that question is the answer to your question because the people with blindsight are us minus interpretation for their visual stimuli.

Okay, then i didn't actually mean stimuli, i meant raw percepts as in, the sensory input at point of contact with your receptors.

I still disagree with the blindsight thing. I think its irrelevant or atmost, an innapropriate comparison.

I feel like we're talking about different things; I feel like you're talking about why a stimulus needs affordances. While im talking about why a stimuli needs to be processed to have a certain identity.

It's a real world example of the exact thing you're asking about. How is that irrelevant? You want to know why our sight is interpreted. People with blindsight are people who don't have that interpretation, so looking into what happens with them is going to be the answer to your question. They can react in low level ways to visual stimuli but they don't have any awareness of being able to see anything.

I don't understand what distinction you're trying to make here. "Affordance" and "identity" are pretty vague terms.

His point is that there tons of similar objects in the world. If you had to remember each and every single one as a separate class of object, you would run out of memory quickly. Look at a parking lot and see all the cars out there. They're all different shapes and sizes but we immediately know what they are without first having to identify the specific make model etc.. and then relate that information to being a car. Our brain skips that step. Illusions abuse that idea that our brain filters that for us.

>His point
You mean my point? You're replying to my post but then talking about the argument I made like I'm the other guy..

>..
That should've been a single period, not an unfinished ellipses.

not but, its not appropriate because they are blind, so its not actually a good comparison. it wouldnt make a good experiment because their blindness and part of the cortex is a confound. youre not measuring vision with/without interpretation. Blindsighted people can't even see the image.

plus, your example is just telling me what its like... its not telling me what it is about either our environment, our brains or both that means sensory information needs deep processing.

What i mean by affordance in this context is needing an "interpretation" to know what kind of actions you can perform with an object.

What about depth illusions?


Lool, no offence, i think you legit got confused by replying to the wrong person you thought you were and then referring to the argument of the wrong person lmao.

>youre not measuring vision with/without interpretation. Blindsighted people can't even see the image.
Blindsighted people can see though. They just don't have the interpretation part so they report that they can't see, but experiments with them as subjects reveal they actually are seeing things and just aren't aware of it.
That's the thing I keep trying to get at here: This IS what sight is all about. You believe not having awareness of an image is something different from "vision without interpretation," but I'm telling you it's not. Those two descriptions are of the same thing. If you take away the interpretation but keep the vision, what you get is literally blindsighted people.

Yes but the information that gets to the cortex is not the same as the information where "interpretation" happens. Its going through a different pathway. A far better comparison is people that were born blind or became blind very early in their lives and then had their blindness reversed at a much earlier date.

I do believe it is something different judging from the studies of blind people i refer to above and things like mental illness which has an effect of visual illusions. These show that you can get different or less interpretation while still being conscious. Also part of the confound is that those lower visual areas naturally have alot less connection to the rest of the cortex than the visual part of the cortex. Who knows if we (and blindsighted people) would have a different experience of the world if they were connected; so that information was consciously available.

I see your point though and i realise now this might be different from my actual question. Yes we need to process objects etc in order to identify things etc. My question is more about What is it about this processing that means we get illusions.

Your brain is a flawed meaty computer that is unable to perceive itself as a brain.

Your eyes are basically flawless sensors, its your brain that fucks up and crashes trying to interpret what the optic nerve tells it.

Also your consciousness is an illusitionary projection and your brain produces solutions before you are cognitively aware of the solution """you"" came up with.

You can cognitively know that what you perceive is an illusion but your brain will never cease to broadcast the false image no matter how hard you look at it.

I think LSD and the like is very good for seeing how illusory your brain can really be. Vision in there is like constantly looking at illusions. And youll see just how much the brain has to construct its world and then with LSD, the beams start tumbling and the house cracks at the cornerstone. All this energy starts to dissipate from these constructions until they erode into maximal entropic states.

>fucks up

? What if your brain is doing it on purpose.