Human vision is probabilistic inference, not faithful recording of light

Evidence

When it comes to human perception, the truth of the matter is that there’s quite literally more than meets the eye. We often take for granted that, on the most fundamental level, what we see with our own eyes must be ‘real’ or ‘true’. But how do you know that anything you see (or, indeed, hear) is real? You might say: it’s just optics; light bounces off an object, hits the retina in your eyes, a signal is transported along the optic nerve, via the thalamus, into the visual cortex, and voila – an image appears. It’s not that simple, however. In fact, much of human vision is probabilistic – in other words, the brain uses cues in the environment to provide a best guess of what is there. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 58

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sensory illusions that serve daily life mislead us about cosmic and quantum scales — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 84; The Kanizsa triangle shows perception can run on inference without any real object — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 60; Perception is a brain interpretation that need not use all sensory detail — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1323

Broader Connections

• Perception is a brain interpretation that need not use all sensory detail #corroborates (0.93) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1323
• The Kanizsa triangle shows perception can run on inference without any real object #exemplifies (0.92) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 60