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Our eyes didn’t evolve to deal with mirrors and reflections. Your brain and eyes ALWAYS assume that there’s a way to interpret what your seeing as objects in 3D space with nothing between you and it.
When you look at a mirror, because of how reflections work, there’s always a “false” solution to the question of “where did this light originate from?” that appears to be an ordinary object behind the mirror. All the properties of light that we’d use to determine depth — blur, angle of divergence, shadows, environmental cues, parallax — are all preserved in a mirror, meaning that there’s no way for us to distinguish the two in a mirror with our eyes alone.
Interestingly, with the right combination of polarizing filters, you can actually distinguish the original from a reflection, but humans cannot innately detect the polarization of light with the naked eye, so that trick normally doesn’t work.
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