Vision Experiment Resolved a Centuries-Old Philosophical Debate

This is a garbage article. I’m sure the research has some merit but it is not explained here. What do they even mean by saying when you look at a manhole cover from a few feet away you see it as circular instead of an ellipse? I see an ellipse. It doesn’t get transformed into a circle. What on earth are they on about?

I'm of the opinion that our eyes extend our brain, and we actually use the external world as working memory to some extent.

The evidence I have is the dramatic drop in perception quality when my eyes are closed. Even though my minds eye is exceptionally vivid, there are differences when visual data is not available.

3d stereo reconstruction of surfaces is one area that is greatly hindered. When my eyes are open, saccades cause waves of stereo correlation to pass over an object revealing it's surface geometry in extreme detail.

Ongoing querying of reality is useful to explain some other detail related perceptual phenomenon.

There was also a visual perception demo I saw at OMSI a few years ago in which a scene had objects appear and disappear. A frame of black between the changes completely disrupted normal change detection and it was very difficult to detect which objects changed when relying on only "visual memory".

My evidence is empirical, but I'm sufficiently convinced that our minds use reality directly for parts of our working memory.

Note: if you use reader view and are puzzled why an article entitled "This Vision Experiment Resolved a Centuries-Old Philosophical Debate" is about a display in New York's Central Park of 3D printed statues of women scientists, try disabling ad blocking.

On both Firefox on my Mac with uBlock Origin and Safari on my iPad with content blockers enabled it gets the right title in reader view but sometimes gets the body from the next article in their infinite scroll of articles. Whether it does this seems to come and go, which suggests it is actually caused by some ad that appears intermittently on the page.

(And on iPad, many people pretty much have to use reader view, because the page completely ignores the user's font size setting...stepping it from 100% to 300% causes no visible changes whatsoever on the page).

I don't see a philosophical debate answered here to be honest.

> The ramifications of this are larger than tilted coins

They always are. The coins you are currently seeing are just weighted experience. Weighted more because of recency or other factors but in conflict with accumulated experience. Why should they just be ignored? I would expect more mental load.

Do we ever escape the perspective from which we view the world?

Well, we can perceive the oval shape as a circle, which would suggest that we do it literally to some degree.

Either I don't get it, or I have another "perspective" as the author as it seems.

> We do not see the world completely separate from our point of view

Well... but we also don't see it completely separate from objectivity if you want to call it that.

Perhaps no philosophical debate and more a neurological one?

> Well, when two things are more similar, it takes longer to distinguish them.

But that's not the only thing that can slow perception down; e.g. it's also been shown that rotation slows down perception. This theory (that similarity slows down comparison) also doesn't have any implication about the locus of the delay: the interference in the comparison could come from anywhere in the visual system, so it would only support the hypothesis that the tilted coin looks more like an ellipse than a non-rotated coin.

It feels to me like being shown a similar shape (and specifically being set a shape-based task) would explicitly reinforce the perspective-interpreted shape, just like someone presenting you with the classic duck/rabbit image and saying the word ‘duck’ in your ear. Therefore I’m not completely sure this proves you would naturally hold on to that representation by default out in the real world.

In other words, we although "see" in a two dimensional planar projection, we comprehend our environment in a 3D rationalized world. The article seems pretty esoteric to me.