5 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
I have to ask. How can we drive or fly if we see like this? Why aren't planes and cars crashing all the time?
Comment by cdskip at 05/02/2025 at 03:43 UTC
9 upvotes, 0 direct replies
We can’t. We only think we are because we’re blind and hallucinating.
But seriously, a lot of it is because in most situations, our brains are quite good at filling in the gaps with accurate predictions of the stuff we aren’t technically actually perceiving properly.
Comment by Lycid at 05/02/2025 at 11:32 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Better simpler answer: our brains work fast enough for all of these tasks to still be fine. If they didn't, we'd not be driving or flying in the first place.
Keep in mind the latency is very very low. Like, yes - actual real life is technically a few milliseconds ahead than what we experience as reality. That's fine though because almost nothing on earth that is relevant to our existence except trying to swat a fly requires faster latency than that anyways.
Comment by revcor at 05/02/2025 at 10:01 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Adding on to what /u/cdskip said, when we talk about the extent to which a particular visual scene is based on the brain “filling in the gaps” that are present in the visual data it receives from the eye, a defining ingredient in this recipe is the frequency with which new sets of data are received.
One still picture sourced from x% detected external light and y% “homemade” bits may very in the fidelity with which it represents the world in front of us, especially a world in motion. But 60 such pictures, each slightly different but stacked into a thick layer of visual data, shrinks these gaps and increases the overall fidelity considerably.
For a one-second gaze out the window, a single visual point frozen at a single moment in time may be “fake” data but accompanied by 59 other sets of data that include that same visual point derived from actual external information.