Eli5: the lens of your eye flips the image of what is happening in front of you and displays it on your retina, then your brain “flips” it again for you to perceive. What is the brain doing for that second flip?
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It’s just your brain deciding that it’s stupid to have things upside down and deciding not to anymore.
An experiment was done where they had volunteers put on goggles that flipped everything upside down. They wore them all the time: sleeping, showering, everywhere all the time.
After about a week, the brain said “screw this, this is dumb” and flipped everything right side up again, and the volunteers functioned normally. They still had the flipping goggles on, and their brain just undid it.
At the end of the experiment they took the goggles off, and everything was upside down again. And again, after a week or so, the brain flipped everything back again.
Your brain just makes stuff up about what you see. It does a tremendous amount of image processing. Your eyes move and wiggle small amounts constantly, it fixes that and makes things appear steady. Your eyes suck at color in your peripheral vision, your brain remembers what color things are and what life should look like and fills things in. You have a blind spot in each eye that you can only notice if you specifically trick your brain at failing at fixing it.
There is no “ground truth” in what you see. It’s all interpreted, from shapes to contrast to color.
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