Seeing is NOT Believing

Everyone's heard of the phrase, "seeing is believing." Really? Are you sure?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100713/sc_livescience/invisiblegorillatestshowshowlittlewenotice

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100714/sc_livescience/languagecanmaketheinvisiblevisible

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080602-foresee-future.html

http://michaelbach.de/ot/index.html (a great catalog of visual illusions)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100609083219.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091006134823.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100114143027.htm

http://www.illusionworks.com/

http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see.html

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/amos/visualillusion.html

http://www.squidoo.com/optical-illusion-videos

http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/personnel/hoffman/illusions.html

http://www.dailyillusions.com/

And of course, no list of how screwed up our perceptions are without a mention of the truly incredible Derren Brown: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown

If you haven't heard of Derren Brown, you should really, really, really watch some of his shows.

I could go on and on and on and…, but at some point it becomes ridiculous. Eye witnesses are not accepted in courts without corroborating evidence because they are so unreliable. Photographs have been faked since the camera was invented. To boot, this only talks about visual tricks that show just how unreliable what we see really is. I didn't even go into all the ways that our religious, political, social, racial and other types of biases affect how we see the world, nor did I list any of the numerous ways our other senses lie to us on a regular basis, nor how our mood changes our perception, etc.

Can we please kill the "seeing is believing" crap? What we see is NOT what is actually going on. You can't trust your own senses. This is why scientists do not consider unsubstantiated observations as having any merit whatsoever. You can't trust your own eyes. If you could, magicians wouldn't exist. So just stop it.

I have to restrain myself mightily every time I hear someone utter this ridiculous fallacy. Humans are so easily manipulated it is seriously beyond belief. If you don't think you are, you really haven't been paying attention. No, I don't exclude myself from this, but at least I know this happens and can at least try to keep it in mind so I can cut down the number of times I am tricked, misled, deceived, or just led astray. But if you don't accept the possibility that the world is not what you think you see, you are an open target to every con man, politician, and marketer that comes your way and you will continue to believe you actually have any control over your life and thoughts when you are simply a tool for someone else.

ADDENDUM: A friend of mine, Abi, described this excellently, I think. Seeing is not believing, it is really believing is seeing. This is very true. People see what they want to see, what they expect to see. Children see the world for what it is, they have no expectations. Sadly, we quickly grow up and we lose the ability to perceive without judgment, without filtering everything. Reality is the cold, hard truth. Our perceptions of it though, are invariably shaped by our thoughts. In turn, our thoughts are shaped by what we perceive. One then has to ask, since this is so, is it even possible to view reality? I don't think so. This means that people who call themselves realists are either deluded or oversimplifying things. If you think you know what reality is, that you know anything for certain, you are simply fooling yourself. As the quantum physicists say, everything is a probability and even that is an illusion of our faulty perception.