Why can things like optical illusions “trick” our brain, even when you know for a fact what the reality is? Why is “what your brain thinks” not equal to “what you know”?
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The real reason is that most optical illusions you know about are modern contrivances that never existed until recently. Evolution shaped our vision based on the world in which we evolved. In the pre-modern world, illusions of the sort that trick us were so rare that there was no significant benefit in having top-down over-rides for perception. Yet there are costs to doing so, like new sources of mistakes and possibly slowing down perception. A feature that costs more than it benefits will not be selected for.
There are some natural illusions, but most of these are rare or so obviously false that, again, not much reason to develop special neural circuitry to bother. Adaptations need to work well most of the time.. not be perfect, always-100% right pipelines to pure truth.
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