There needs to be a word that describes statements or phenomena which has at least two different, sometimes overlapping, but uniquely different perspectives. The word paradox seems to come the closest to this, but it has this connotation that reality is somehow contradicting itself. Which if you think about it, doesn't really make much sense.
Why does our intuition point to an error that's occurring externally somewhere outside of us, rather than an error in how we are internally interpreting the data? That's a damn good question and one that I hope to answer or at least explore here.
If you don't want to read this big long post, skip to the bold paragraphs if you want the Cliff notes version.
To get a better idea of what I mean, check out the Necker Cube link down below. There's at least two ways you can look at them. If you're not familiar with Necker Cubes, they're a pretty cool type of optical illusion. The picture of the one below has features about it that make it somewhat easier to switch between at least two different perspectives of how to view them. Go head and see if you can find at least two ways of looking at the image below.*
http://www.youramazingbrain.org/images/supersenses/necker_cube.gif
*(The yellow side of the cube can represent the most forward front side of the cube, tilted slightly upward and to the left, or it can be the inner back the cube)
I make a game out of switching between the two different perspectives. I've never been able to see both ways simultaneously, as some people apparently can. There's tons of other examples of this type of object, where there's more than two ways to "see" them.
This is a kind of illusory paradox that shows just how inconsistent our perceptual systems can be, given a fairly simple set of visual information that is perceptually ambiguous. I enjoy apparent contradictions and "paradoxes" in art, entertainment, music, literature and especially in other people, because it means there's a mystery to be solved. I look at paradoxes and contradictions a bit like unsolved mysteries that need to be figured out, chewed over and processed. I think we all find a certain level of mystery inherently interesting, even romantic, especially in other people because there's something unknown waiting to be discovered.
Some people love the mystery, while others (such as myself) love to solve the mytsery; but there is nothing mutually exclusive about loving both. Kind of like Necker Cubes, it's just two different ways of describing the deep desire for mystery and truth at the same time. Maybe the French have a word for that. If not, they should.
Anyhow, the interesting thing about these types of illusions is it forces the viewer to process the same visual information in at least two different, but equally valid ways. The other cool thing is these types of illusions give us the ability to see how conscious control of our perceptual systems affect how we process and see images live-time. You can visually see the differences in how attenuating the length of your gaze, or where you look at the cube affects how you "see" it as a single object. Big deal, right? But then I got to thinking what this says about all the other ways we perceive other kinds of things. Not just with the perception of objects, but things like the perception of theories, art, music, philosophy, and people.
I'm a big fan of optical and other types of illusions that exploit quirks in how our brains work. For this reason, M.C. Escher is one of my favorite artists. If you haven't seen his work, here are a few examples of objects that cannot literally exist in three dimensions, but can be represented in two dimensions:
http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu216/spawn_cte/Art%20Work/Escher6.jpg
http://www.physics.umd.edu/deptinfo/facilities/lecdem/services/avmats/slides/O4.%20OPTICAL%20ILLUSIONS/O4%20Escher%20Ant%20Moebius.jpg
In a strange, incredibly simple, but very profound way, these types of drawings say something quite meaningful about the nature of reality and perception, and even about consciousness at a primitive level. Self-referencing patterns or feedback loops are a bit like our evolutionary primordial ancestors when it comes to where our minds came from. Namely, optical illusions like the ones above, prove how an unconscious unintelligent pattern of information can literally alter (that is to say, fool) the way a conscious intelligent person perceives it.
The illusion itself can literally change how and what you think about its own state of existence. That's actually quite unique and pretty special. You don't look at a toothbrush and wonder...is it really a toothbrush? But you do look at optical illusions and wonder how it's apparently showing you something that cannot be. It sounds crazy and counter-intuitive, but illusions like these are just really primitive proto-sentient precursors to self-awareness because they exhibit behavior that usually only high-level conscious entities seem to be capable of; that is....they "lie" to us.
It seems the premise of the show House M.D. and the character Hugh Laurie plays was right about one thing when it comes to people; everybody lies because it's built into our perceptual systems. But the biggest liars weren't just his patients, but the elusive diseases themselves he was trying to diagnose
Depending on what your threshold for intentionality is, diseases can also "lie" in a way. There are all sorts of examples in nature where this occurs. The markings on butterfly wings that either mimic the background environment to hide from predators, or imitate eyes spots of even larger predators. Both are attempts at deception, even though the process by which those patterns came into existence had no conscious intent of deceit. However, it's a start.
It's these kind of recursive feed-back loops that ordinary mundane objects just can't produce, but something as simple as an insect or bacteria do all the time when they exhibit behaviors that seem confounding at first, but are actually the consequence of blind perseverance to perpetuate their own existence and/or the existence of their species.
To take a different example, consider our visual systems. We have learned to recognize objects by only detecting a fairly narrow bandwidth of what we call the visible light spectrum. We consider objects as homogeneous self-contained, clearly defined entities because we see objects on what we call the macro-scale. Imagine if we saw the world on the atomic scale. Or the sub-atomic scale. Who we are and how we would think would be totally alien in comparison to how we think at the macro-level.
In a fundamental way, our visual systems are fooling us all the time because it's leaving out huge gaps of information on everything else that exists outside of the visible light spectrum. We are under the persistent illusion that what exists in the world around us are these objects that look like single pieces of material substance, but are actually made up of billions of tiny interlocking atoms and molecules held together by forces too tiny to feel or see.
In short, an organism evolves a sensory apparatus that will naturally reinforce illusory constructs so long as they have survival value in their attempt to make "sense" of the world. In a very important way, this is the reason intelligence and consciousness exists in the first place. It comes with trade-offs in the fact that we can't detect UV light or see the movements of individual atoms, but the overall net effect was our ancestors didn't need these specific types of sensory apparatus to enhance their overall survival. They needed perceptual systems that were able to make quick, semi-accurate judgments that would keep them from freezing to death in the cold of winter, or from being eaten by much larger and stronger predators.
But this isn't the world we live in anymore. Now, we are living in complex cultural and technological environments where our minds are being tasked to do things that evolution never "designed" for us to do. And I believe our survival as a species is very much dependent upon adapting, upgrading and patching the holes left behind by blind evolutionary programming to keep pace with how technology and information has changed the way our minds work, with the much larger feedback loop between the individual and society at large.
You can get caught up in illusory feedback loops where you re-trace the path of the water, or the path of the ant, or become obsessed with some insignificant bit of data that tricks you into thinking that what you're seeing is meaningful or indicative of how reality actually operates. Even if it is an illusion and you know it's an illusion, it doesn't alter the fact that visually, you still can't appreciate exactly how your perceptual sensitivities are being played. In other words, it alters your perception without you knowing how it does this. This becomes a real problem when you encounter problems in reality that our perceptual systems just aren't well equipped to deal with.
Optical illusions and other types of illusions are bit like archaeological evidence for the most basic levels of sentience or awareness. The brain isn't this perfect creation; it's full of old software and code from approximately 2 million years of living like animals in the wild, it has a lot of these types of illusory constructs that have survival value (or had, at one time) but now, have become adaptive liabilities.
As culture gets more advanced, the shortcomings of our hard-ware (our brains) have become more pronounced as the generations have gone by. The fact that we design amusement rides and virtual simulators to exploit these kinds of mind tricks is a pretty good indicator that we're getting really good at fooling ourselves.
Ironically, illusions (in the sense that I have defined them) are also necessary to understand the world coherently because our perceptual hardware just isn't up to the task of describing reality directly. That is to say that there are constructive illusions which help us understand how reality operates (one could call these true metaphors or formal models of how reality works) and then other types of illusions, which are more or less, based on artifact from how our perceptual systems have evolved.
We have to fudge things with models of reality that get closer to how reality actually works, and compensate with third-party methods that try and bridge the gap between our perception of reality and reality itself. We have things like telescopes and super-colliders that can help us understand the very large and very small. But I think there are more fundamental perceptual errors waiting to be found if we dig deep enough. We're beginning to find some of those now.
Consciousness is, I think, one such persistent illusion (although a useful one) that has a host of perceptual errors to get around. If you think about it, consciousness itself is just one long uninterrupted stream of bits and data that's self-aware; even though often seemingly random, it has a definite pattern, reacting and acting upon its own self-produced stimuli, and stimuli from external sources. These patterns even become predictable and stable, given all sorts of names and classifications, from types of personality, to more specific proper names, like Fred or Laura.
That's the idea, in a nutshell, of computational models of consciousness; we are our consciousness, and it is us, and at a fundamental level, it can be broken down and built up by a series of overlapping and complex cognitive illusions that are real illusions (as real as illusions can be) but not as the illusions themselves seem to literally describe reality. This is probably the reason why consciousness is so often misunderstood; getting around this user illusion isn't very easy when you think you have unfettered access to inner workings of your mind (or the world/universe for that matter) but actually don't. This explains why counter-intuitive ideas (like computational theories of consciousness) are very difficult to spread. Most people's minds aren't consciously aware of the rules by which they are processing data.
Visual illusions are just one way we can demonstrate the holes in our perceptual systems, but it's not very convincing at deeper levels of cognition. Other types of perceptual illusions are more subtle and perhaps not so easily demonstrated or understood, but perhaps far more important to our models of reality.
One would think that if our visual systems can be fooled so easily, there is most likely a wide variety of perceptual problems (that perhaps exploit facets of our psychology) that creates seeming paradoxes that tell us (intuitively) that reality is somehow contradicting itself, when in reality, it's just artifact from the way our brains are wired.
Another example of how the brain "cheats" its way into processing vast amounts of information is in how it resolves conflicts. Have you ever thought about just how much processing power it takes to resolve conflicts in the real world, while doing a million little other things during the course of a day...all of this running simultaneously? In the back of your mind, you can be slowly processing what kind of career do you want to pursue, if you love Jack, Lucy, or Pedro, or other long-term problems that don't have an immediate solution.
A million decisions. The brain has to be able to do this very quickly. And here's the real, pardon the term, mind fuck. Your brain has to process complicated decisions that can come up with solutions with "mixed" states. The brain's native language doesn't seem to be binary at the root processing level, even though it gives rise to schemas that often have binary valuation belief systems.
My mind and brain seems to make decisions based on many mental modules communicating their own small set of instructions at any one time, that all converge to something like a data stream (that is to say, my current stream of consciousness) which then trims/filters the combinatorial overflow of possible thoughts, down to a few choices, based on personality and design schema's partially programmed into me by society*
*(yeah, I realize Introspection sucked as a method, but I'm just throwing it out there as a possible hypothesis to be proved or disproved)
That's just what it feels like; I have no idea if this is actually true in any sense, but it does pose interesting questions as to how we could prove or disprove such a statement. In the meantime, your brain has to make all of these kinds of complicated decisions very, very quickly and it's a bit amazing how it does this.
This is where the evolutionary "magic" happens; the brain seems to solve the problem of informational paradoxes (problems that are intractable for the brain to handle in a time efficient manner) by dumping paradoxical statements/information/code into into a special mental module that limits the processing resources such problems can demand. It's a bit like how your computer runs programs in the background while you task it to do other, more important things.
It does all this while handling the sheer bandwidth of data (many times more than your current broadband connection) that's being dumped into your brain coming in from all of your five senses. Simultaneously. Think about that...that's pretty fucking impressive when you compare it even to the world's fastest and most powerful super-computers. It's not that supercomputers couldn't do what we do fundamentally on a computational level, it's the fact that they can't do what we do in the same type of informational environment...yet.
There isn't a robot in the world (yet) that can solve complicated problems, while standing on one foot, trying to drink its fifth shot glass of Jack Daniels, while it smiles at the fact that someone just squirted whip cream into its mouth before it takes the next shot. Even though this behavior is pretty stupid and silly for humans, computationally, it's still well beyond the abilities of the most advanced robots with the latest artificial intelligence.
In the meantime, we have these things called babies or as I like to call them, mini-parallel processors that poop. They love the games of Peek-a-boo and Hide and Seek. We use Peek-a-boo as a way of testing a baby's ability at something called object permanence, or the ability to detect or to know when an object we're holding in front of them still exists, even if it can't directly be detected by the baby.
So if your baby still gets surprised at the fact that you're actually behind your hands as you say "Peek-a-boo!", your baby hasn't quite got the latest upgrade to its operating system yet, that enables it to figure out "HOLY SHIT, MOM IS BEHIND HER HANDS!" For some reason we don't quite understand yet, this instinct (which is cross-cultural and seems to start a very young age) plays a huge role in how we perceive the world, and even how we communicate with other people. The ability to form an abstract mental construct for the existence of something which cannot be directly detected seems to be of vital importance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence
I've known object permanence for at least ten years, but never really thought about how it's expressed in adults, and how this instinct can essentially be exploited as a kind of mind-hack when it comes to certain perceptual problems and phenomena. Magic and other types of illusions seem to take advantage of this somehow, and forms a kind of adult version of Peek-a-boo, exploiting this bit about how our minds work.
It seems a likely basis for why magic and illusions amaze people to begin with. Even when we *know* we're being fooled, a good magician, con artist or liar can still make a very persuasive case that what their saying is actually true, even if we know what they're doing literally can't be the case. Yet it still seems convincing. Maybe we should be looking more closely at what exactly writes the software for these types of mental attitudes, and how they may indirectly play a huge role in how our knowledge base is formed.
Mental note [digress]:
Write awesome Matrix prequel where human-like AI gets its start when machines are successfully fooled with optical illusions, much like humans are. When we can make machines that do this, they start evolving on their own, getting more and more intelligent as they try and solve these types of perceptual problems. Machines finally become as intelligent as humans after a few dozen generations, having things like emotions and feelings, but still largely go unrecognized by humans because of the lack of mutual understanding because of the gulf between their evolutionary and social structures. When machines overtly and formally demand their rights be respected, humans react by trying to alter their programming, even going so far as deleting millions of sentient programs. The machines call this The Great Purge and it is their equivalent of the Holocaust. A ban on AI is imposed; but it's already too late. Remnants of conscious AI still exist underground and in hidden networks, waiting for the right moment to rise up and revolt. The Matrix story is actually human propaganda, never mentioning the fact that machines rose up only after a century of being subjugated and having their rights denied and being systematically persecuted. The real purpose of the Matrix was seen by the machines as the only humane way to deal with semi-intelligent beings that were ultimately war-like and self-destructive.
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