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Molly Pieri's picture

Believing is Seeing

A week ago, Emily Alspector posted a comment titled "Seeing is Believing". After our last few classes, however, I'm fairly well convinced that the seeing-believing causal relationship is actually the reverse of this. It seems like in many instances our eyes do not physically perceive an image, but our mind decides to believe that it is there, and only as a result of this do we "see" the missing image. (As in the dot demo we spoke about last week.) But more significantly still, is when our eyes perceive no physical difference between object, but our mind fills in the difference for us. An example of this phenomenon was the checker-board picture which was part of the lateral-inhibition demonstration. With these sorts of things in mind, I would put forth that (at least sometimes) it is not seeing something which causes us to believe in its existence, but rather belief in something which causes us to see it.

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