Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [25]
Of the very long list of reasons we can get things wrong, the most elementary of them all is that our senses fail us. Although these failures sometimes have grave consequences (just ask Captain Ross), we usually think of sensory mistakes as relatively trivial. In fact, we often don’t think of them as mistakes at all. And yet, in many respects, failures of perception capture the essential nature of error. There’s a reason that James Sully, that early chronicler of wrongness, took Illusions as both the title of his book and the template for all other forms of error.
The rest of us do this, too, albeit mostly without realizing it. When we discover that we have been wrong, we say that we were under an illusion, and when we no longer believe in something, we say that we are disillusioned. More generally, analogies to vision are ubiquitous in the way we think about knowledge and error. People who possess the truth are perceptive, insightful, observant, illuminated, enlightened, and visionary; by contrast, the ignorant are in the dark. When we comprehend something, we say I see. And we say, too, that the scales have fallen from our eyes; that once we were blind, but now we see.
This link between seeing and knowing is not just metaphorical. For the most part, we accept as true anything that we see with our own eyes, or register with any of our other senses. We take it on faith that blue is blue, that hot is hot, that we are seeing a palm tree sway in the breeze because there is a breeze blowing and a palm tree growing. As I’ve already suggested, and as we’ll see in more detail in the upcoming chapters, we are all prone to regarding the ideas in our own heads as direct reflections of reality, and this is particularly true in the domain of perception. Heat, palm trees, blueness, breeziness: we take these to be attributes of the world that our senses simply and passively absorb.
If that were the case, however, it is unclear how our senses could ever deceive us—which, as we’ve just seen, they are eminently capable of doing. Moreover, they are capable of doing so under entirely normal circumstances, not just under exceptional ones like those John Ross experienced. Consider what happens when you step outside on a cloudless night. For the purpose of this thought experiment, imagine that you step outside not in Chicago or Houston, but in someplace truly dark: the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe that the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars. Stand there long enough and you’ll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your own position in this spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on—land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars is quite stationary—stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you.
“Landing the Treasures, or Results of the Polar Expedition!!!,” a 1819 cartoon by George Cruikshank ridiculing the Ross voyage. The man on the far left is saying, “I think as how we have bears, gulls, savages, chump wood, stones, and puppies enough without going to the North Pole for them.” Ross and his crew are depicted without noses, a reference to an inuit practice of pulling noses in place of shaking hands. (The man carrying the rear end of the polar bear is saying, “It’s a good thing I’ve lost my nose.”)
Occasional bad weather and a hundred-odd years of artificial illumination aside, this is the view that we as a species have been looking at for 73 million nighttimes. It is also, of course, an illusion: almost everything we see and feel out there on our imaginary Patagonian porch is misleading. The sky is neither vaulted nor revolving around us, the land is neither flat nor stationary, and, sad to say,