Oooooh! You're no fun anymore!
In all seriousness though, I agree with you to an extent. Suggestions such as 'all humans have tails' or 'some people who you think are dead are not, you just can't see them' - while surprising and creepy - would be extremely unlikely. I can see direct and obvious disadvantages to a person or species lacking such faculties. In fact, the disadvantages to those two would be so drastic that it would most likely lead to extinction.
And yet... I could still imagine us being blind to certain things. The first sort of blindness would be due to Darwinian irrelevance: for instance, many flowers have beautiful patterns visible in the UV spectrum, but there's no reason for us to see them. That might seem mundane nowadays, but five hundred years ago it would have freaked people out (maybe). I wouldn't be surprised that there are cognitive capabilities we've never suspected to exist.
The second sort of blindness is where it gets weird. True, our brains only allow trustworthy algorythms to bypass the logic circuits... or do they? The brain is not optimal. While I doubt we have invisible tails, that doesn't mean that there isn't some other phenomenon that we're simply incapable of noticing even when it's staring us right in the face.
for instance, many flowers have beautiful patterns visible in the UV spectrum
Just in case anyone is curious about this:
link (via twitter: @izs)
Human beings are all crazy. And if you tap on our brains just a little, we get so crazy that even other humans notice. Anosognosics are one of my favorite examples of this; people with right-hemisphere damage whose left arms become paralyzed, and who deny that their left arms are paralyzed, coming up with excuses whenever they're asked why they can't move their arms.
A truly wonderful form of brain damage - it disables your ability to notice or accept the brain damage. If you're told outright that your arm is paralyzed, you'll deny it. All the marvelous excuse-generating rationalization faculties of the brain will be mobilized to mask the damage from your own sight. As Yvain summarized:
I find it disturbing that the brain has such a simple macro for absolute denial that it can be invoked as a side effect of paralysis. That a single whack on the brain can both disable a left-side motor function, and disable our ability to recognize or accept the disability. Other forms of brain damage also seem to both cause insanity and disallow recognition of that insanity - for example, when people insist that their friends have been replaced by exact duplicates after damage to face-recognizing areas.
And it really makes you wonder...
...what if we all have some form of brain damage in common, so that none of us notice some simple and obvious fact? As blatant, perhaps, as our left arms being paralyzed? Every time this fact intrudes into our universe, we come up with some ridiculous excuse to dismiss it - as ridiculous as "It's my daughter's arm" - only there's no sane doctor watching to pursue the argument any further. (Would we all come up with the same excuse?)
If the "absolute denial macro" is that simple, and invoked that easily...
Now, suppose you built an AI. You wrote the source code yourself, and so far as you can tell by inspecting the AI's thought processes, it has no equivalent of the "absolute denial macro" - there's no point damage that could inflict on it the equivalent of anosognosia. It has redundant differently-architected systems, defending in depth against cognitive errors. If one system makes a mistake, two others will catch it. The AI has no functionality at all for deliberate rationalization, let alone the doublethink and denial-of-denial that characterizes anosognosics or humans thinking about politics. Inspecting the AI's thought processes seems to show that, in accordance with your design, the AI has no intention to deceive you, and an explicit goal of telling you the truth. And in your experience so far, the AI has been, inhumanly, well-calibrated; the AI has assigned 99% certainty on a couple of hundred occasions, and been wrong exactly twice that you know of.
Arguably, you now have far better reason to trust what the AI says to you, than to trust your own thoughts.
And now the AI tells you that it's 99.9% sure - having seen it with its own cameras, and confirmed from a hundred other sources - even though (it thinks) the human brain is built to invoke the absolute denial macro on it - that...
...what?
What's the craziest thing the AI could tell you, such that you would be willing to believe that the AI was the sane one?
(Some of my own answers appear in the comments.)