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Science cannot explain why man walks on two legs or why man needs such a big brain just to live in a cave.
Stalin and Hitler used forms of social Darwinism so it's implied evolution must be bad, too.
Hm. I wouldn't say either of those are illusions. They're flawed rhetorical points.
I think of an illusion as something you'd generally accept at face value, something that seems obvious or natural.
Edit: I also don't want to turn this into an evolution vs. religion thread, partly because it's been overdone, partly because nobody is really religious on here anyway, but mostly because I don't think much of either stance relates specifically to illusions, metaphysical or otherwise. I think the biggest "illusion" that Darwin overturned is the general sense that complex things require complex creators/causes.
I think of an illusion as something you'd generally accept at face value, something that seems obvious or natural.
I'm not getting it. The earth being flat resting on a giant turtle's back doesn't seem obvious - people have to be told that's the way things are.
I'll just say an illusion is something that appears to be true even when you know it's not ... like when 1=0 or eyes on a portrait follow you. The moon is made of green cheese or two bricks tied together fall faster than a single brick when dropped off the Tower of Pisa.
I've been pretty interested in the whole idea of "what actually exists" ever since taking an introduction to philosophy course, but really we didn't go into that much. We only went over Descartes' Meditations. I think I'm in the boat as Pony: it's interesting, but really doesn't seem to matter to me one way or the other. Still fun to think about every now and again though.
I'm not getting it. The earth being flat resting on a giant turtle's back doesn't seem obvious - people have to be told that's the way things are.
On the back of a turtle is certainly not obvious.
The earth being flat, though, is obvious. It looks flat. A child or an uneducated adult would (and for much of history, did) conclude that it's flat. Unless you stand on a tall mountain and examine the curvature of the horizon, there's nothing immediately obvious to indicate that it's not flat. And even getting from "the horizon is curved" to "the earth is round!" is quite a leap that must have been a mindfuck when first proposed.
I'll just say an illusion is something that appears to be true even when you know it's not ... like when 1=0 or eyes on a portrait follow you. The moon is made of green cheese or two bricks tied together fall faster than a single brick when dropped off the Tower of Pisa.
But I woudln't call "the moon is made of green cheese" an illusion at all, because it doesn't appear to be true. Casually looking at the moon, there's nothing to suggest that (1) it's green, or (2) that it's made out of cheese.
Galileo's gravity experiments didn't really dispel any illusions either, since nobody had performed those particular experiments. They dispelled Aristotelian ideas about weight and matter, but I wouldn't call those ideas "illusions." Aristotle thought that like elements attracted each other, so that's why earth fell to earth. But this idea wasn't based on any observation, it was just an ad-hoc explanation. I wouldn't call the ad-hoc explanation an illusion.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here, I'm just trying to limit the scope of this thread.
Ok...how about manufactured illusions like gold is valuable? Gold is useless as a building material but people still feel a need to dig it up and digging it up drives up the value of gold.
Or how about the Pepsi challenge where tasters are blindfolded and allowed one or two sips of popular sodas? It's a rigged game! Trickery! Illusions!
Science cannot explain why man walks on two legs or why man needs such a big brain just to live in a cave.
Stalin and Hitler used forms of social Darwinism so it's implied evolution must be bad, too.
Are you trying to say something here
That the idea that science explains everything is an illusion. Or something. Either way, I roll a Will check, if only because no one has made that joke yet.
Ok...how about manufactured illusions like gold is valuable? Gold is useless as a building material but people still feel a need to dig it up and digging it up drives up the value of gold.
Or how about the Pepsi challenge where tasters are blindfolded and allowed one or two sips of popular sodas? It's a rigged game! Trickery! Illusions!
well money it self has some illusionist aspects to it, but at least gold is more palpable then most other things you could invest your money in to.
Most people can easily tell the difference blind folded, the Pepsi challenge is just Pepsi picking the hand-full of people that preferred pepsi. It might be an illusion if you mask the sense of smell while taste testing, but that's not the case.
Ok...how about manufactured illusions like gold is valuable? Gold is useless as a building material but people still feel a need to dig it up and digging it up drives up the value of gold.
Or how about the Pepsi challenge where tasters are blindfolded and allowed one or two sips of popular sodas? It's a rigged game! Trickery! Illusions!
well money it self has some illusionist aspects to it, but at least gold is more palpable then most other things you could invest your money in to.
Most people can easily tell the difference blind folded, the Pepsi challenge is just Pepsi picking the hand-full of people that preferred pepsi. It might be an illusion if you mask the sense of smell while taste testing, but that's not the case.
Actually the Pepsi challenge was based upon the fact that when presented with a small sip of cola, people tend to go more for the sweeter tasting drink, while over the course of the drink the inverse is true.
When my cat looks at the TV, he sees a big hunk of glass and plastic with moving lights. When he looks at a book, he sees a chunk of paper.
When I look at the TV, the TV disappears. I don't notice the physical structure of the TV, or even the lights. I don't even see them when I'm watching a show.
When I read a book, the paper disappears. Even the letters disappear. I don't notice black strokes of ink when I read, or even words and sentences. For much of the time, my brain seems to be on the verge of hallucinating the images described in the text. It's weird.
Maybe this can be generalized to communication, because what I'm doing right now—writing this post on my laptop—strikes me as largely illusory. Bees communicate with each other by dancing. When a bee finds food, she returns to the hive and literally dances to communicate to the other bees where it is and how to get there. How do the bees internalize the motions of the dancer? Do they "see" each and every wing and appendage movement? Or do they internalize the physicality of the dancing in the same way we internalize the physicality of our TV's—which is to say, not at all?
When my cat looks at the TV, he sees a big hunk of glass and plastic with moving lights. When he looks at a book, he sees a chunk of paper.
When I look at the TV, the TV disappears. I don't notice the physical structure of the TV, or even the lights. I don't even see them when I'm watching a show.
When I read a book, the paper disappears. Even the letters disappear. I don't notice black strokes of ink when I read, or even words and sentences. For much of the time, my brain seems to be on the verge of hallucinating the images described in the text. It's weird.
Maybe this can be generalized to communication, because what I'm doing right now—writing this post on my laptop—strikes me as largely illusory. Bees communicate with each other by dancing. When a bee finds food, she returns to the hive and literally dances to communicate to the other bees where it is and how to get there. How do the bees internalize the motions of the dancer? Do they "see" each and every wing and appendage movement? Or do they internalize the physicality of the dancing in the same way we internalize the physicality of our TV's—which is to say, not at all?
I guess the thread titled "Illusions" is as good a place as any to post about your experiences with LSD.
When my cat looks at the TV, he sees a big hunk of glass and plastic with moving lights. When he looks at a book, he sees a chunk of paper.
When I look at the TV, the TV disappears. I don't notice the physical structure of the TV, or even the lights. I don't even see them when I'm watching a show.
The cat can sometimes forget, too. I had one that would trying to get the bird out of the side of the TV when it flew off to the side.
When my cat looks at the TV, he sees a big hunk of glass and plastic with moving lights. When he looks at a book, he sees a chunk of paper.
When I look at the TV, the TV disappears. I don't notice the physical structure of the TV, or even the lights. I don't even see them when I'm watching a show.
When I read a book, the paper disappears. Even the letters disappear. I don't notice black strokes of ink when I read, or even words and sentences. For much of the time, my brain seems to be on the verge of hallucinating the images described in the text. It's weird.
Maybe this can be generalized to communication, because what I'm doing right now—writing this post on my laptop—strikes me as largely illusory. Bees communicate with each other by dancing. When a bee finds food, she returns to the hive and literally dances to communicate to the other bees where it is and how to get there. How do the bees internalize the motions of the dancer? Do they "see" each and every wing and appendage movement? Or do they internalize the physicality of the dancing in the same way we internalize the physicality of our TV's—which is to say, not at all?
I guess the thread titled "Illusions" is as good a place as any to post about your experiences with LSD.
Seriously, man! Start playing a movie or something on computer and pay attention to it.
If you are paying attention to it, you are not paying attention to the medium. You are not watching, looking at, or even noticing or internalizing the physical screen. You aren't even noticing the lights that make up the movie. You certainly don't see them as "lights." The lights encode something else, and that's what you see.
When my cat looks at the TV, he sees a big hunk of glass and plastic with moving lights. When he looks at a book, he sees a chunk of paper.
When I look at the TV, the TV disappears. I don't notice the physical structure of the TV, or even the lights. I don't even see them when I'm watching a show.
The cat can sometimes forget, too. I had one that would trying to get the bird out of the side of the TV when it flew off to the side.
Wait, your cat can actually identify shit on the TV?
Is it an HDTV? I was under the impression that cats and dogs literally cannot "see" TV images. Because since they don't have any smell, their brains ignore them or something.
When my cat looks at the TV, he sees a big hunk of glass and plastic with moving lights. When he looks at a book, he sees a chunk of paper.
When I look at the TV, the TV disappears. I don't notice the physical structure of the TV, or even the lights. I don't even see them when I'm watching a show.
The cat can sometimes forget, too. I had one that would trying to get the bird out of the side of the TV when it flew off to the side.
Wait, your cat can actually identify shit on the TV?
Is it an HDTV? I was under the impression that cats and dogs literally cannot "see" TV images. Because since they don't have any smell, their brains ignore them or something.
Yes. And this years ago... NatGeo specials on PBS in the days of picture tubes.
Also had a dog that would be happy and bark whenever dogs were on the screen and would go absolutely batshit if there were horses on the screen. He hated horses "in reality", too. Would bark up a storm if he ever saw or smelled one in a field. He was a pug. We figured one of his ancestors was trampled in Mongolia.
For the dog, I don't know for sure if it was the sounds accompanying the animals that were the queue, but the cat would "hunt" birds and rodents if she saw them on screen. It wasn't just reacting to the movement, either. She'd register it from the couch and then start to stalk, and then if they ever looked like they were going to move off screen, she'd attack. Strangest shit I've ever seen. That cat did a lot of crazy things. Her favorite food was chocolate donuts. She'd react when my dad pulled up in the driveway and got out of the car with the Dunkin Donuts box. If I'm lyin, I'm dyin.
now don't take this the wrong way, but I have to ask, are you brain damaged?
Just kidding. It doesn't completely work and you can easily tell there's something wrong, however it is very noticeable how messed up he looks right side up compared to upside down.
This illusion illustrates one of the reasons why it's nearly impossible for most people to draw faces upside down.
I think really all visual, auditory, or really just any sense-based illusions whatsoever all congeal into one, single, fascinating principle: no human being can objectively observe the world. The outside world that we see or hear or smell or feel is just an approximation based off of incomplete data and run through many different filters and parsed by unwieldy and occasionally inaccurate mental mechanisms to establish a picture of reality that is merely sufficient for survival. We have a mental model of the world around us that is incredibly simplified, with all the little details and non-crucial aspects of a scene just melting out of existence because we have no need, no desire, or no faculty by which to observe them.
The strangest things are those which we potentially could know, but our brain actively blocks them out because they are unimportant or completely detrimental to our smooth functioning. It makes everything seem a lot less...I suppose, real. Our picture of the reality around us is only as accurate as someone describing a scene to us in their own words, or some artist making an impressionistic reproduction of some still-life. The more I come to understand about the functioning of our brains, the more obvious this becomes. It makes people's desire to believe that they have a clear view of reality seem all the more arrogant.
Which brings me to another thing, and that is the illusion that any single human being has a comprehensive understanding of the world around them, or even more common, an understanding of themselves. I have a firm belief that no one can possibly understand themselves; that no one can possibly create an objective picture of their real place in the world. I mean, it's sensible, the self has to be the subject to which we are intrinsically the most biased. There are things we want to believe about ourselves, or things that we just do believe about ourselves despite the complete lack of evidence. And, even more interestingly, there are justifications for all the things that we do which we just make up, after the fact, and in order to make our self-image fit more comfortably into the cosmic role that we've constructed for ourselves. No one is self-conscious, not even me (probably especially not me), the things I believe about myself are as inaccurate and self-inflating (or self-loathing) as anyone else.
However, people pretty violently cling to the notions they have about themselves and who they are in relation to everyone else. How often do people really question whether or not they're the victim? How often do people really change their minds about how attractive they are to the people around them? No one is self-aware. If they were maybe they'd realize that their emotions were stupid, that their sense of entitlement was unwarranted, that social standing is a terribly arbitrary notion, and that we're all microscopic in the big picture. But we don't. We never do. We go on each being the center of our own universe, while we struggle desperately to convince ourselves and others that we don't actually act that way.
Enlightened or stupid, you're still going to float through life somehow, AJ. And then you die.
On another note, how about illusions that play on our assumptions? I don't mean optical illusions with top hats and parallel lines - I mean buying into an illusion just because you think that's the way it should be. I was walking down the juice aisle at the grocery store and I saw some Ocean Spray Cranberry Cocktail. Yum. There was a splash of juice and some berries on the label just below the logo. I flipped the container on the side to where the ingredients were listed and saw *Contains 15% juice*. Here I am in the juice aisle and this stuff isn't juice at all. Illusions! Crafty marketing!
When you think about it, all the food modeled on their containers are illusions - the stuff you buy never looks as good as what's on the box and that's no fault on your part. Whether it's using glue instead of milk for cereal or pizza crusts spray painted a golden brown, the packaging always lies and everyone subconsciously falls for it now and then.
I knew that chimps and other primates recognized themselves in mirrors and could "see" stuff on computer screens, but not cats. So pluffy!
Animals are strange like that. Laser pointers, for example, will cause some animals to run around chasing it and others to just look at it briefly and walk away.
Must be some genetic tendency towards playfulness or something.
Posts
I think of an illusion as something you'd generally accept at face value, something that seems obvious or natural.
Edit: I also don't want to turn this into an evolution vs. religion thread, partly because it's been overdone, partly because nobody is really religious on here anyway, but mostly because I don't think much of either stance relates specifically to illusions, metaphysical or otherwise. I think the biggest "illusion" that Darwin overturned is the general sense that complex things require complex creators/causes.
I'm not getting it. The earth being flat resting on a giant turtle's back doesn't seem obvious - people have to be told that's the way things are.
I'll just say an illusion is something that appears to be true even when you know it's not ... like when 1=0 or eyes on a portrait follow you. The moon is made of green cheese or two bricks tied together fall faster than a single brick when dropped off the Tower of Pisa.
The earth being flat, though, is obvious. It looks flat. A child or an uneducated adult would (and for much of history, did) conclude that it's flat. Unless you stand on a tall mountain and examine the curvature of the horizon, there's nothing immediately obvious to indicate that it's not flat. And even getting from "the horizon is curved" to "the earth is round!" is quite a leap that must have been a mindfuck when first proposed.
But I woudln't call "the moon is made of green cheese" an illusion at all, because it doesn't appear to be true. Casually looking at the moon, there's nothing to suggest that (1) it's green, or (2) that it's made out of cheese.
Galileo's gravity experiments didn't really dispel any illusions either, since nobody had performed those particular experiments. They dispelled Aristotelian ideas about weight and matter, but I wouldn't call those ideas "illusions." Aristotle thought that like elements attracted each other, so that's why earth fell to earth. But this idea wasn't based on any observation, it was just an ad-hoc explanation. I wouldn't call the ad-hoc explanation an illusion.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here, I'm just trying to limit the scope of this thread.
Ok...how about manufactured illusions like gold is valuable? Gold is useless as a building material but people still feel a need to dig it up and digging it up drives up the value of gold.
Or how about the Pepsi challenge where tasters are blindfolded and allowed one or two sips of popular sodas? It's a rigged game! Trickery! Illusions!
He's trying to say that you are the holocaust.
Most people can easily tell the difference blind folded, the Pepsi challenge is just Pepsi picking the hand-full of people that preferred pepsi. It might be an illusion if you mask the sense of smell while taste testing, but that's not the case.
Actually the Pepsi challenge was based upon the fact that when presented with a small sip of cola, people tend to go more for the sweeter tasting drink, while over the course of the drink the inverse is true.
--
My favorite illusion is "down" and "up."
When my cat looks at the TV, he sees a big hunk of glass and plastic with moving lights. When he looks at a book, he sees a chunk of paper.
When I look at the TV, the TV disappears. I don't notice the physical structure of the TV, or even the lights. I don't even see them when I'm watching a show.
When I read a book, the paper disappears. Even the letters disappear. I don't notice black strokes of ink when I read, or even words and sentences. For much of the time, my brain seems to be on the verge of hallucinating the images described in the text. It's weird.
Maybe this can be generalized to communication, because what I'm doing right now—writing this post on my laptop—strikes me as largely illusory. Bees communicate with each other by dancing. When a bee finds food, she returns to the hive and literally dances to communicate to the other bees where it is and how to get there. How do the bees internalize the motions of the dancer? Do they "see" each and every wing and appendage movement? Or do they internalize the physicality of the dancing in the same way we internalize the physicality of our TV's—which is to say, not at all?
I guess the thread titled "Illusions" is as good a place as any to post about your experiences with LSD.
If you are paying attention to it, you are not paying attention to the medium. You are not watching, looking at, or even noticing or internalizing the physical screen. You aren't even noticing the lights that make up the movie. You certainly don't see them as "lights." The lights encode something else, and that's what you see.
No LSD required. Maybe some pot though.
Is it an HDTV? I was under the impression that cats and dogs literally cannot "see" TV images. Because since they don't have any smell, their brains ignore them or something.
They also react to laser pointers.
It's hard to be certain what they actually experience, especially considering how variable their reactions can be to mirrors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUnUzjiC5k0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejSD0tv2ONQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARan0kFChjU&feature=related
Also had a dog that would be happy and bark whenever dogs were on the screen and would go absolutely batshit if there were horses on the screen. He hated horses "in reality", too. Would bark up a storm if he ever saw or smelled one in a field. He was a pug. We figured one of his ancestors was trampled in Mongolia.
For the dog, I don't know for sure if it was the sounds accompanying the animals that were the queue, but the cat would "hunt" birds and rodents if she saw them on screen. It wasn't just reacting to the movement, either. She'd register it from the couch and then start to stalk, and then if they ever looked like they were going to move off screen, she'd attack. Strangest shit I've ever seen. That cat did a lot of crazy things. Her favorite food was chocolate donuts. She'd react when my dad pulled up in the driveway and got out of the car with the Dunkin Donuts box. If I'm lyin, I'm dyin.
Shit's been around for years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdADSx8JpfI&eurl=
face recognition is really strange sometimes.
That illusion doesn't work on me.
It's been done.
Confuse-A-Cat
now don't take this the wrong way, but I have to ask, are you brain damaged?
Just kidding. It doesn't completely work and you can easily tell there's something wrong, however it is very noticeable how messed up he looks right side up compared to upside down.
This illusion illustrates one of the reasons why it's nearly impossible for most people to draw faces upside down.
The strangest things are those which we potentially could know, but our brain actively blocks them out because they are unimportant or completely detrimental to our smooth functioning. It makes everything seem a lot less...I suppose, real. Our picture of the reality around us is only as accurate as someone describing a scene to us in their own words, or some artist making an impressionistic reproduction of some still-life. The more I come to understand about the functioning of our brains, the more obvious this becomes. It makes people's desire to believe that they have a clear view of reality seem all the more arrogant.
Which brings me to another thing, and that is the illusion that any single human being has a comprehensive understanding of the world around them, or even more common, an understanding of themselves. I have a firm belief that no one can possibly understand themselves; that no one can possibly create an objective picture of their real place in the world. I mean, it's sensible, the self has to be the subject to which we are intrinsically the most biased. There are things we want to believe about ourselves, or things that we just do believe about ourselves despite the complete lack of evidence. And, even more interestingly, there are justifications for all the things that we do which we just make up, after the fact, and in order to make our self-image fit more comfortably into the cosmic role that we've constructed for ourselves. No one is self-conscious, not even me (probably especially not me), the things I believe about myself are as inaccurate and self-inflating (or self-loathing) as anyone else.
However, people pretty violently cling to the notions they have about themselves and who they are in relation to everyone else. How often do people really question whether or not they're the victim? How often do people really change their minds about how attractive they are to the people around them? No one is self-aware. If they were maybe they'd realize that their emotions were stupid, that their sense of entitlement was unwarranted, that social standing is a terribly arbitrary notion, and that we're all microscopic in the big picture. But we don't. We never do. We go on each being the center of our own universe, while we struggle desperately to convince ourselves and others that we don't actually act that way.
On another note, how about illusions that play on our assumptions? I don't mean optical illusions with top hats and parallel lines - I mean buying into an illusion just because you think that's the way it should be. I was walking down the juice aisle at the grocery store and I saw some Ocean Spray Cranberry Cocktail. Yum. There was a splash of juice and some berries on the label just below the logo. I flipped the container on the side to where the ingredients were listed and saw *Contains 15% juice*. Here I am in the juice aisle and this stuff isn't juice at all. Illusions! Crafty marketing!
When you think about it, all the food modeled on their containers are illusions - the stuff you buy never looks as good as what's on the box and that's no fault on your part. Whether it's using glue instead of milk for cereal or pizza crusts spray painted a golden brown, the packaging always lies and everyone subconsciously falls for it now and then.
Animals are strange like that. Laser pointers, for example, will cause some animals to run around chasing it and others to just look at it briefly and walk away.
Must be some genetic tendency towards playfulness or something.