Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [27]
Interpretation implies wiggle room—space to deviate from a literal reading, whether of a book or of the world. As that suggests, this model of perception (unlike the one in which our senses just passively reflect our surroundings) has no trouble accommodating the problem of error. Every step in the interpretative process represents a point of potential divergence between our minds and the world—a breach where mistakes can sneak in. This model also answers the second question I asked about perception: How can we determine when it is accurate and when it is not? Unfortunately, the answer is that we cannot. Since we generally have no access to the objects of our sensory impressions other than through our senses, we have no independent means of verifying their accuracy. True, we can seek confirmation from other people’s senses, but there’s no way to be sure that theirs aren’t failing them in the same way. As a result, there is no guarantee that we aren’t as wrong about a basic perception right now as most people were for most of history about the nature of the night sky.
This isn’t to say that every act of interpretation is an act of misinterpretation. In perception, as in so many things in life, departing from literalism often serves us uncommonly well—serves, even, a deeper truth. Consider a mundane visual phenomenon: when objects recede into the distance, they appear to get smaller. If we had sensation without interpretation, we would assume that those objects were actually shrinking, or perhaps that we were growing—either way, a bewildering, Alice-in-Wonderland-esque conclusion. Instead, we are able to preserve what is known as size constancy by automatically recalibrating scale in accordance with distance. We know that planes don’t get smaller after they take off, and that the buildings in our rearview mirror don’t sink into the earth as we drive away.
For a different example of the utility of interpretation, consider your blind spot—the literal one, I mean. The blind spot is that part of the eye where the optic nerve passes through the retina, preventing any visual processing from taking place. If perception were just unembellished sensation, we would experience a chronic lacuna where this nerve interrupts our visual field. But we do not, because our brain automatically corrects the problem through a process known as coherencing. If the blind spot is surrounded by blue sky, we will “see” blue sky there as well; if it is surrounded by Times Square, we will “see” tourists and taxis. These, then, are instances—just two of many—in which the interpretative processes of perception sharpen rather than distort our picture of the world.
No matter what these processes do, though, one thing remains the same: we have no idea that they are doing it. The mechanisms that form our perceptions operate almost entirely below the level of conscious awareness; ironically, we cannot sense how we sense. And here another bit of meta-wrongness arises. Because we can’t perceive these processes in action, and thereby take note of the places where error could enter the picture, we feel that we cannot be wrong. Or, more precisely, we cannot feel that we could be wrong. Our obliviousness to the act of interpretation leaves us insensitive—literally—to the possibility of error. And that is how you and I and everybody else in the world occasionally winds up in (you will pardon the expression) Captain John Ross’s boat.
I can’t whisk you off to the Arctic to see a superior mirage, but I can easily get you to think you see something you don’t. Look:
This is one of my favorite optical illusions, not because it is particularly dazzling but because it is particularly maddening. The trick is that the square labeled