👁️

[holy]

The biological cameras we're equipped with are remarkable pieces of evolutionary engineering. But, sorry to but your bubble, but our perception is fundamentally limited.

We only perceive a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our brains fill in blind spots constantly. We're easily fooled by optical illusions.
People walk around thinking they're seeing 'reality' when they're actually experiencing a highly filtered, constructed version of it. The human eye can only detect wavelengths between roughly 380 to 700 nanometers. That's nothing compared to the full electromagnetic spectrum.

Mantis shrimp have sixteen photoreceptor types compared to our measly three. Bees can see ultraviolet patterns on flowers that are completely invisible to us.
Some snakes can literally see infrared heat signatures.

This is precisely why scientific instruments and methodologies are so crucial. They extend our perceptual limitations. We've built tools to detect everything from gravitational waves to quantum fluctuations, phenomena that no human could ever directly perceive.

The most dangerous people are those who are absolutely certain about what they perceive. They don't understand how profoundly limited their sensory apparatus is. They don't grasp how their brain actively constructs reality rather than passively receiving it.

Your brain receives roughly 11 million bits of information per second, but your conscious mind can only process about 50 bits. The rest gets filtered, discarded, or processed unconsciously, and that filtering process isn't neutral. It's shaped by your expectations, beliefs, past experiences, and evolutionary biases. Your brain isn't a camera but an active prediction machine constantly trying to make sense of incomplete information.

This is why eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. This is why people can be so absolutely convinced of things that are demonstrably false. Their brains have literally edited out contradictory information before it ever reaches consciousness.

And this is exactly why the scientific method is the most powerful tool humans have ever developed. It's not perfect, but it's designed specifically to counteract these cognitive limitations.

- Double-blind studies
- Control groups
- Peer review

They're safeguards against our brain's tendency to see what it expects to see.

The really insidious part is that we're not just blind to our perceptual limitations. We're blind to our blindness. People walk around with absolute certainty in their subjective experience, never questioning the massive information processing happening beneath their awareness. The Dunning-Kruger effect applies to our basic perception of reality.​

 

[Defeatist]

You scream into a empty space, but where does the sound leave to