As an artifact of evolution we make incorrect guesses about the world, and choices that would be incorrect given our guesses—just in a way that worked really well in ancestral environment, and works well enough most of the time even now.
Yes, well, very well indeed, more than you probably suspect, once you average over all situations. For example, look at how much information the brain is able to squeeze out of the light hitting the retina. It’s able to use the cues of shadows, color, light gradients, etc., to construct a coherent, accurate picture of the world around you.
Its only “holes” (badly wrong priors) are those cases we know as “optical illusions”. And as far as retinal-interpretation algorithms go, it’s pretty amazing that it only returns the wrong results in these very rare, unnatural cases.
Ditto for proprioception (sensation of your body parts’ orientation). You can immediately, intuitively infer where your hand is just from muscle sensations.
Or language: once you learn a language, you have a very accurate predictive model that allows you to quickly disambiguate similar sounds based on what kinds of words are likely to come next, so you never hear “touch the blue block” as “Dutch the blue blog”, to use an example from a paper someone linked here once.
Yes, well, very well indeed, more than you probably suspect, once you average over all situations. For example, look at how much information the brain is able to squeeze out of the light hitting the retina. It’s able to use the cues of shadows, color, light gradients, etc., to construct a coherent, accurate picture of the world around you.
Its only “holes” (badly wrong priors) are those cases we know as “optical illusions”. And as far as retinal-interpretation algorithms go, it’s pretty amazing that it only returns the wrong results in these very rare, unnatural cases.
Ditto for proprioception (sensation of your body parts’ orientation). You can immediately, intuitively infer where your hand is just from muscle sensations.
Or language: once you learn a language, you have a very accurate predictive model that allows you to quickly disambiguate similar sounds based on what kinds of words are likely to come next, so you never hear “touch the blue block” as “Dutch the blue blog”, to use an example from a paper someone linked here once.