The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald Hoffman

Author:Donald Hoffman [Hoffman, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 12: Correcting an erased square. The visual system creates a square over the four disks on the right to correct an erasure error. © DONALD HOFFMAN

Your visual system has corrected four erasure errors and created four glowing lines. But it also detects another coded message, at yet a higher level: it detects a square. It receives messages at different levels of abstraction—one-dimensional lines and a 2D square. Your correction of errors probably involves both levels at once; the evidence that the message is a square increases the confidence of your visual system in the evidence that lines were erased and should be restored.

Your visual system can detect a second message about a square. Again, think of the four black disks as holes in a white sheet of paper, and imagine that you’re looking through these holes. Then behind the paper you’ll see a square. When you do, notice that its lines don’t glow. You’re confident that the lines are there, but they’re hidden by the white paper.

So you can get two different messages about a square from this figure. One message has the square in front, with glowing lines; the second message has the square in back, with lines that don’t glow. Notice that all four lines glow, or else all four lines do not glow. You never see, say, two lines glowing and two not glowing. Why? Because your visual system has united all four lines into a single unified message: a square. It has “entangled” the four lines into a single object so that what happens to one line must happen to all.

Now let’s take our example one final step. In Figure 13 there are, on the left, eight black disks with white cutouts. On the right these same disks are rotated so that their cutouts align. Suddenly you see twelve glowing lines; you have corrected twelve erasures of lines.

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