MrHen comments on Bizarre Illusions - Less Wrong

11 Post author: MrHen 27 January 2010 06:25PM

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Comment author: MrHen 27 January 2010 11:22:22PM 0 points [-]

Okay. Do you think it would be valuable to just edit the post in place?

As best as I can tell, these are the trouble paragraphs:

Today I looked at the above illusion and thought, "Why do I keep thinking A and B are different colors? Obviously, that is not what my visual system is trying to tell me." I am being stupid when my eye looks at this illusion and I interpret the data in such a way to determine distinct colors. That information is not being transmitted and received. If it were, the illusion wouldn't be an illusion.

An optical illusion is only bizarre if you are making a bad assumption about how your visual system is supposed to be working. It is a flaw in the Map, not the Territory. I should stop thinking that the system is reporting True Colors. It isn't. And, now that I know this, I am suddenly curious about what it is reporting. I have dropped a bad belief and am looking for a replacement. Once I have found the right answer, this optical illusion should become as uninteresting as questioning whether 1 is prime. It should stop being weird, bizarre, and incredible. It should highlight an obvious reality.

Is this better?:

Today I looked at the above illusion and thought, "Why do I keep thinking A and B are different colors? Obviously, something is wrong with how I am thinking about colors." I am being stupid when I look at this illusion and interpret the data in such a way to determine distinct colors. My expectations of Reality and the information being transmitted and received are not lining up. If it were, the illusion wouldn't be an illusion.

An optical illusion is only bizarre if you are making a bad assumption about how your visual system is supposed to be working. It is a flaw in the Map, not the Territory. I should stop thinking that the system is reporting True Colors. It isn't. And, now that I know this, I am suddenly curious about what it is reporting. I have dropped a bad belief and am looking for a replacement. In this case, the visual system is distinguishing between [what term goes here?], not individual RGB style colors. Now that I have right answer, this optical illusion should become as uninteresting as questioning whether 1 is prime. It stops being weird, bizarre, and incredible. It merely highlights an obvious reality.

Comment author: mattnewport 28 January 2010 12:07:48AM *  1 point [-]

It seems to me that you are still using the word colour in a way that suggests you haven't really grasped the insight that makes this illusion seem not-bizarre. That insight is fundamentally that the statement "this ball is blue" is not equivalent to the statement "a digital photo of a scene containing this ball would have pixel values of 0, 0, 255 at pixel locations where light from the ball reached the sensor". It is a much more complex (and more useful) statement than that. The bad assumption is that 'colour' when used to refer to a property of objects in the world determined through visual perception has any simple relationship with RGB values recorded by a digital camera. You still seem to be talking as if RGB values are somehow 'true' colours.

Comment author: wedrifid 28 January 2010 01:37:54AM *  1 point [-]

The bad assumption is that 'colour' when used to refer to a property of objects in the world determined through visual perception has any simple relationship with RGB values recorded by a digital camera.

Especially in the case of human tetrachromats.

Comment author: MrHen 28 January 2010 12:22:30AM *  0 points [-]

I am trying to find a way to say what you said with one phrase or word. I feel like I am struggling to find a term.

Comment author: mattnewport 28 January 2010 12:35:30AM 4 points [-]

I think the key for me in understanding this type of illusion (and the general phenomenon of colour constancy) was to realize that 'colour' in common usage ("this ball is blue") is perceived as a property of objects and we infer it indirectly based on light that reaches our retinas. That light also has a 'colour' (subtly different meaning) but it is not something we perceive directly because it is not very useful in itself.

This makes perfect sense when you think about it from an evolutionary perspective - we evolved to recognize invariant properties of objects in the world (possibly fruit in trees for primates) under widely varying lighting conditions. Directly perceiving the 'colour' (RGB) of light would not tell us anything very useful about invariant object properties. There is enough overlap between the two meanings of colour for them to be easily confused however and that is really the root of this particular illusion.

In computer graphics we commonly use the term 'material' to describe the set of properties of a surface that govern how it responds to incident light. This encompasses properties beyond simple colour ("shiny blue ball", "matte blue ball", "metallic blue ball"). I don't know if that usage is well understood outside of the computer graphics field however.

Comment author: MrHen 28 January 2010 01:12:39AM 0 points [-]

I completely agree with you. At this point, I am just trying to clean up the article to help clarify the answer behind the illusion. Does the phrase, "I should stop thinking that the visual system is reporting RGB style colors" mesh okay? That is the only location of RGB as of this edit.

Comment author: mattnewport 28 January 2010 01:15:48AM 1 point [-]

Yes, I think 'RGB colours' is better than 'True Colours' in this context.

Comment author: MrHen 28 January 2010 01:21:58AM 0 points [-]

Thanks. Do you have any other suggestions that may help clarify the article? Your explanations have been very helpful. Learning the terms was apparently something I never bothered to do. Oops. :P

Comment author: mattnewport 28 January 2010 01:41:05AM 0 points [-]

The article reads better now. So do you feel the bizarreness has disappeared now you understand the phenomenon better?

Comment author: MrHen 28 January 2010 02:01:32AM 1 point [-]

Yes. The key point that you mentioned here:

I think the key for me in understanding this type of illusion (and the general phenomenon of colour constancy) was to realize that 'colour' in common usage ("this ball is blue") is perceived as a property of objects and we infer it indirectly based on light that reaches our retinas.

This happened sometime this morning. The more I read here, the more I understand it in the sense that I know the name of the relevant field, a whole bunch of new terms, and more details about how we perceive colors. It gets less and less bizarre as the day goes, which is always fun. :)

Comment author: bgrah449 28 January 2010 12:32:49AM 0 points [-]

How is "Color gross of lighting conditions"?

Comment author: SilasBarta 27 January 2010 11:26:23PM 1 point [-]

It sounds like you're trying to come up with a sentence or two that captures all of the insight on color that the commenters have given. While I'm a big fan of summarizing, and a big critic of those who can't, I don't think you can get it to work here. Instead of your final bolded change (the others are good), just point to or quote a few good comments that show what the visual system is doing, and how the optical illusions trick it.

Comment author: MrHen 27 January 2010 11:33:58PM *  0 points [-]

How about:

In this case, the visual system is not trying to distinguish between individual RGB style colors (more details in the comments).

EDIT: I updated it with something similar. Hopefully it was an improvement. :) Thanks again for your help (which isn't to say that I wouldn't mind more help...)

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