Your Lyin' Eyes

Seeing is believing. Or is it?

Can you really believe what you see? It depends. Our minds do such a great job of trying to make sense of our visual inputs, and we’re always susceptible to being tricked.

Optical illusions are a great way to illustrate this phenomenon:

Doesn’t it look like seven rectangles are rotating around in a circle? Look a little closer (or cheat by putting your mouse or finger over one of the “rectangles” so you can see what’s going on.

These aren’t really rectangles at all, except for the shape on the left. Our mind tells us they must be rectangles since we see that one rectangle right there, and rectangles look like parallelograms when they’re rotating around in a circle like that. Coupled with the appearance of up/down columns in the back (those also aren’t really moving!), the rectangles seem to rotate.

Magicians have used concepts like these for millennia. They’ve long understood that our mind wants for certain things to be there, and we’ll work desperately to make these things seem real.

Of course, we are now in the era of deepfake videos. You can no longer watch a video and instantly know whether it’s been tampered with. Instead, deepfakes are increasingly better, and increasingly easy for people to make.

People can trick us, but nature has been tricking us for even longer.

A mirage is a different sort of optical illusion, one that’s not made by humans. Nevertheless, our eyes take in the input of bending light, and we “see” a body of water that’s not there. We try our desperate best to make sense of our optical inputs.

Here’s something I wrote about that specific phenomenon:

Nature provides a lot of examples of things that trick us.

At the quantum level of the ridiculously tiny, particles don't really exist in the way we understand solid objects existing. Their behavior changes depending on if we're “looking at” them (the observer effect), and they can be linked across huge distances (entanglement). None of this lines up with how we experience the world with our own eyes.

At ridiculously big scales, relativity takes center stage. Gravitational lensing makes far-away objects appear much, much closer. When an object travels near the speed of light, its length contracts considerably, making it appear short to an outside observer. There’s no such thing as “at the same time.”

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave encapsulates this concept very well, and I wrote about that a bit here:

One last thing to consider: Galileo saw moons orbiting Jupiter, and he realized that the Earth wasn’t the center of everything. This paved a path for Newton’s universal laws of gravitation. However, if you didn’t have a telescope during Galileo’s time (EG, almost everyone alive everywhere), it sure looks like the Sun goes around the Earth.

Let’s keep this in mind today as we explore the world. Do we really see what we think we see?