Jesus, this illusion is so powerful, you’d have to have a very poorly optimized brain to really see anything else.
Edit: checked Firefox and Chrome on Android and they look exactly the same (work on me). Low brightness works better than full brightness.
Same here. After a bit I could see some worm stretching if I focused on particular points in the image.
I noticed that as soon as I registered all of the movement, my eyes fixed a certain way that they do when I'm driving and navigating an overly complex traffic situation. I was super reluctant to try to focus them any other way.
There are a lot of ways it’s optimal to be able to approximate and fill in details like this with normal visual processing, but literally not being able to unsee falsehoods (and I can’t switch it off in my brain like another commenter said they could) doesn’t feel like one of those optimal scenarios to me.
(I think people like to call this “steel man” or whatever but just generally applying a charitable interpretation…) I think their take on optimization is about falsehoods about reality that our brains assimilate to make functioning or survival possible under certain circumstances, like perceiving magenta as not-green or being able to observe a field of grass without being hyper aware of each blade of grass within it.
All of which is good insofar as it actually serves us, but it’s really weird to me to frame it so absolutely. It’s not an optimization if it doesn’t serve us and we’re just misperceiving reality for no purpose, and there’s nothing wrong with you or anyone else who doesn’t. If anything it’s just… “wow, electrified meat evolved to be conscious is really wacky and super subjective!”