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The Lens That Sees Its Flaws — LessWrong

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Light leaves the Sun and strikes your shoelaces and bounces off; some photons enter the pupils of your eyes and strike your retina; the energy of the photons triggers neural impulses; the neural impulses are transmitted to the visual-processing areas of the brain; and there the optical information is processed and reconstructed into a 3D model that is recognized as an untied shoelace; and so you believe that your shoelaces are untied. Here is the secret of deliberate rationality—this whole process is not magic, and you can understand it. You can understand how you see your shoelaces. You can think about which sort of thinking processes will create beliefs which mirror reality, and which thinking processes will not. Mice can see, but they can’t understand seeing. You can understand seeing, and because of that, you can do things that mice cannot do. Take a moment to marvel at this, for it is indeed marvelous. Mice see, but they don’t know they have visual cortexes, so they can’t correct

x The Lens That Sees Its Flaws — LessWrong Predictably Wrong Epistemology Gears-Level Map and Territory Reflective Reasoning World Modeling Rationality Frontpage 496 The Lens That Sees Its Flaws by Eliezer Yudkowsky 23rd Sep 2007 3 min read 53 496 Light leaves the Sun and strikes your shoelaces and bounces off; some photons enter the pupils of your eyes and strike your retina; the energy of the photons triggers neural impulses; the neural impulses are transmitted to the visual-processing areas of the brain; and there the optical information is processed and reconstructed into a 3D model that i

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