= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Morendil comments on Bizarre Illusions - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (305)
Uh? What do you mean by "obvious" in that last sentence?
(Post otherwise interesting, and I for one like them short.)
"Obvious" as in not "weird, bizarre, or incredible." Would "simple" be a better word there?
I'm just not seeing what obvious reality it highlights, so either I'm particularly dense or it's not in fact obvious.
So, rephrasing: what reality is being highlighted by the "illusion" ?
Your prime number analogy suggests that it's in fact the "both colors are the same" assertion which is an illusion. The perceptual reality is that the pixels in these areas are discriminated as different colors. The illusion consists of looking at pixel with identical RGB values and thinking "Oh, these have the same position in colorspace, I expect my brain to perceive them as identical."
The reality suggested by the "illusion" is that this expectation doesn't hold in general, it's a stupid model. A smarter model would take more things into account before it predicted what our brain will perceive as identical colors.
But this is very much non-obvious...
The post is keying off of Think Like Reality.
Looking at the image it should be obvious that the colors do not look the same. This is reality. We think they should look the same even though it is obvious they don't. Once we find the right answer to why they don't look the same, the illusion should stop being bizarre.
If you find an explanation, return to the illusion, and still think the illusion is bizarre, than something is wrong. You fall into the category that EY is discussing in Think Like Reality.
I am convinced that most of what we consider to be fancy illusions will be considered obvious to future generations. They will look at this image and wonder why we thought it was so fascinating. When our optics system is solved it would completely ridiculous to assume that we would look at that image and think that the two squares should look like the same color.
But your post hasn't offered an explanation. And I don't, in fact, look at that image and think that the two squares should look like the same color.
A and B are in fact different colors, for a value of "in fact" which takes into account that the picture is a picture of something - a checkerboard. My visual system makes the correct inference, conditioned on the assumption that I'm looking at a checkerboard.
EDIT: what I should say is that I'm still surprised, knowing what I know about my visual system and how it works, when you tell me that the pixels have the same RGB values. But that's not a "reality is weird" surprise, it's more like the surprise of learning some interesting bit of trivia.
To really be totally unsurprised, I'd have to enhance not just my knowledge of the visual system, but my visual system - to include an RGB calibration system.
EDIT: Oh, okay, I read your edit and that makes much more sense. I agree that it may be difficult to get to the point of being unsurprised. Getting there isn't obvious. You know you are there when you are unsurprised by the illusion. Once Reality is unsurprising and obvious, you are there.
I feel like I have lost the point of this conversation. What, in the following, do you disagree with?
This reason is contained somewhere inside of the "visual system"
It is better to not be surprised by Reality
We should not be surprised when A and B look like different colors
It is incorrect to call Reality bizarre as per Think Like Reality
I disagree with #3 and #4. Also #6, mildly - it's not just our visual system that's at issue here, it's our color vocabulary and our "meta" thinking about our color system that explains the "illusion" - that explains why we might think it bizarre.
Oh, okay. Well... I guess I don't feel like debating the definition of color since that is completely irrelevant to the point of the post. I wish this was made clear earlier.
Perhaps I can answer your original question this way:
It has nothing to do with the actual answer to the example illusion. What I mean is that once we have the answer to an illusion, the illusion should stop surprising us.
Neither do I feel like debating the definition of color.
What I am is disappointed. You brought up the "color constancy" phenomenon as an instance where "think like reality" is applicable, and then failed to follow through with an analysis of what is actually going on. You sound as if you are content to know that the phenomenon is in principle explicable; as if the post has done its job by demonstrating your commitment to "thinking like reality". I would prefer you had gone deeper into the object-level analysis and offered your own explanation of what is going on in this particular case.
This is a little bit like parents who lecture their children about the importance of being truthful, vs. parents who demonstrate being truthful - and being OK with confronting unpleasant truths.
EDIT: I didn't mean to sound sanctimonious (I realize I do sound sanctimonious). My main intent is to express a wish regarding what I'd like to see in future posts of this type.
The point of this post is not to debate, discuss, or analyze color constancy. The point of the post is to talk about illusions and how we think of them as bizarre when we shouldn't.
I have not once debated color or the theories behind the illusion. All I did was use a word one way when other people use it another way. I am not trying to offer some strange, new truth about a picture. I used it as an example because people recognize it, not because that particular example matters.
I apparently have completely missed with this post. I have watched its karma swing all over the place in just a few hours and all of the 36 comments so far are talking about something I consider completely irrelevant to the intended point. The same thing happened with my last post, too, so something is very off in my expectations regarding people's responses to the post. Something I did caused you to expect something that I had absolutely no intention of providing. It sucks for you and it sucks for me.
I don't really mind you sounding sanctimonious because I don't care about our relative moral status. I find it frustrating that we had to go back and forth so long to end up where we did. I am not fully convinced my point ever did get across, but at least now I know how you perceived the post. Hopefully by the next one I will have figured out what went wrong.
In other words, this is the visual version of "if a tree falls in the forest...", except that we already defined 'color' as qualia rather than wavelengths, right?
Since you mention it, that's something I should have brought up in one of the Mitchell_Porter consciousness threads: the colors you see are not actually matched up one-to-one with the wavelengths hitting your retina. Rather, the visual system does something like subtracting away the average color.
Meaning, the color that you experience seeing depends on all the colors in the scene, not just the wavelength of the light coming off each specific object.
Some people were talking as if you were getting direct knowledge of (something equivalently expressible as) wavelengths, which is unfortunate, since part of the path to demystifying qualia is understanding this kind of processing.
Um, "we already defined" - the referent(s) of that phrase are very ambiguous, I'm afraid. Who's "we" and where was that definition ?
I definitely agree that color discriminations in the brain (the processes that eventually end up with color words coming out of our mouths) are about way more than wavelengths. I'd prefer the term "discrimination" to "qualia", the latter carries philosophical baggage that I'd rather do without.
It's a royal 'we' in this case: Some subset of the group of commenters here at LW, and that subset doesn't include me. It was discussed at some length in the recent discussion of consciousness. I wasn't paying much direct attention to the conversation, though, so I can't be more specific than that. (I'm not even sure that the relevant bits are all in one post's comments.)
I think what you're trying to say is that the phenomenon becomes highly expected, not aberrant with respect to your world model.
Yes.