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Vaniver comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong
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Funnily enough, I have never once noticed the elliptical shape of a coin when viewed at an angle. It just looked like a perfectly round circle, only tilted slightly.
If I had to guess, I'd say my brain doesn't process spatial information all that well, so my looking at a tilted coin was very similar to a middle school student reading about trigonometry- no glint of recognition whatsoever. To them it just looks like funny words and numbers.
You realize that a tilted circle is an ellipse, right?
I actually had not, and yet I knew what an ellipse was. As I said, I didn't process the shape very much, so it somehow felt perfectly evenly round, and yet tilted.
I'm confused. You just described your brain processing spatial information incredibly well. It figured out that the space contained a tilted round coin based on what a superficial parsing of the information would have described as an elliptical pattern.
That's good processing? I figured it was bad that it just made that jump without noting the change in visual appearance. I must be misusing the word processing.
Consider this: programming a computer to perceive a coin-viewed-at-an-angle as an ellipse is algorithmically and computationally trivial. Programming the same computer to perceive said coin as a circle is far less trivial; algorithmic sophistication, and more processing power, is required.
Furthermore, our brains are designed to resolve a two-dimensional visual grid into a representation of a three-dimensional scene. The correct 3D representation of the scene is one that includes a circular (well, thin cylindrical) coin. Therefore a brain that perceives the coin as circular regardless of orientation is working as designed.
It may not be that complicated- a brain could just retain the memory of roundness from looking at the coin and look up the memory in place of actual processing, which must be what I was thinking of when I doubted my brain's spatial processing. Would a person who has never seen a coin or similar object perform as well?