Illusions are cool. They make me think something is happening when it isn't. When offered the classic illusion pictured to the right, I wonder at the color of A and B. How weird, bizarre, and incredible.
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 my I look at this illusion and I 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 they were, the illusion wouldn't be an illusion.
The number 2 is prime; the number 6 is not. What about the number 1? Prime is defined as a natural number with exactly two divisors. 1 is an illusionary prime if you use a poor definition such as, "Prime is a number that is only divisible by itself and 1." Building on these bad assumptions could result in all sorts of weird results much like dividing by 0 can make it look like 2 = 1. What a tricky 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 visual system is reporting RGB style 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, my visual system is distinguishing between something else entirely. Now that I have 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 merely highlights an obvious reality.
Addendum: This post was edited to fix a few problems and errors. If you are at all interested in more details behind the illusion presented here, there are a handful of excellent comments below.
The world is big and complex, and contains lots of different things. There is plenty of pseudo-art out there, no question -- just like there is plenty of pseudo-science. But for reasons that aren't immediately obvious (though some hypotheses do suggest themselves after a bit of thought), people regard pseudo-art as diminishing the credibility of Art as a pursuit, while not doing the same with pseudoscience vis-a-vis Science.
I should admit that I'm really only expertly-familiar with one particular art form (music), so the following is largely extrapolation as it applies to others -- but I can't imagine that the situation isn't similar.
There is a direct analog of inferential distance in art. In fact, "analog" may not be the right word; it may just literally be a form of inferential distance. Experience and training make a huge difference with respect to how a work is perceived. This is an effect quite independent of social clique-formation; it's simply the result of one's brain working along a certain path for a long time, after which it becomes difficult for others who haven't traveled the same path to follow one's thoughts. Unfortunately, this fact is not sufficiently appreciated; people simply expect inferential distances to be short.
Given this, it's clearly possible that one could slowly retrace the path for the benefit of others, in many small steps, eventually bringing them along to where one is. But most people with advanced artistic knowledge do not have this skill, and most people without advanced artistic knowledge don't expect them to, because they don't expect art to need to be explained. So it shouldn't be surprising that there aren't a lot of really good art explanations around.
I would be careful with invocation of inferential distance. It's not a get-out-of-explanation-free card you get to use whenever you have a hard time justifying a belief (not that you were trying to use it this way, but some standards have to be met -- see below).
There are many reasons why you could have a hard time explaining a concept to someone. It could be that the concept is mush to begin with, and only kept afloat by a common agreement by insiders not to call anyone out. It could be that you don't actually understand it, in the rationalist sense of... (read more)