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MrMind comments on Open thread, 7-14 July 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In a weird dance of references, I found myself briefly researching the "Sun Miracle" of Fatima.
From a point of view of a mildly skeptic rationalitist, it's already bad that almost anything written that we have comes from a single biased source (the writings of De Marchi), but also bad is that some witnesses, believer and not, reported not having seen any miracle. But what arose my curiosity is another: if you skim witnesses accounts, they tell the most divers(e) things. If you OR the accounts, what comes out is really a freak show: the sun revolving, emitting strobo lights, dancing in the sky, coming close to the earth drying up the soaking wet attendants.
If you otherwise AND the accounts, the only consistent element is this: the 'sun' was spinning. To which I say: what? How can something that has rotational symmetry be seen spinning? The only possible answer is that there was an optical element that broke the symmetry, but I have been unable to find out what was this element. Do you know anything about it?
The human brain is capable of registering "X is moving" without being able to point to "X was over here and is now over there". This can happen visually with the rotating snakes illusion, or acoustically with Shepard tones, for instance. It's also pretty common on some psychedelic drugs.
Or if your inner ear is messed up somehow by illness, drunkenness, etc. (though what you then think is moving is yourself, or perhaps the rest of the universe around you).
Well, the rotating snakes have a lot of element that breaks the symmetry. But if you stare at a perfectly blank disk it's impossible to tell if it's moving or not.
I didn't mean to suggest that exactly the same thing was going on; just that it was analogous: it's possible to have the perception of motion without there being any motion going on. There's no consistency checker in the human perceptual system to keep that from happening.
I suspect that's why optical illusions are so fascinating to some of us — they demonstrate that our perceptions don't implement the law of non-contradiction. The snakes illusion is just a quick way to demonstrate this in humans who aren't in a religious ecstasy or on psychedelics.