In case you missed it... (and what explains it?)
(Published in Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011. Stephen Law. Pages 129-151) EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS Stephen Law Abstract The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of indepen
Comments
I have the 'lazy eye' syndrome, ie: my brain pays little or no attention to the input from the 'bad' eye.
This suggests that the reason for the illusion involves the merging of the images from the two eyes.
Looks to me as if the artist might be suggesting something about male/ female identity.
View the revolving hollow face mask illusion. Which demonstrates how mental programming overrides conscious reasoning. The reverse is concave, without dispute. But the brain compels an observer to believe that it is convex, as it normally would be. Thus rendition trumps reality.
My guess is that it has a lot to do with the difference between central and peripheral vision, with the latter being of poor fidelity. Usually our eyes flit from area to area within our visual fields, so that most of the area is briefly viewed by our central ("foveal") vision. We don't notice that we are doing this (it is an unconscious reflex) and the brain assists by piecing the bits together into a coherent whole that consciousness gets fed, so we aren't aware how bad our peripheral vision actually is.
By keeping our central vision trained on the cross, this reflex is suppressed.
There may be more to it, though. I have a suspicion this illusion also keys into the propensity of our brains to see faces in anything face-like. Perhaps the illusion is what happens when you feed the "face detection" program poor data from our peripheral vision, rather than the central vision that normally (unconsciously) does all the proper viewing. The distorted faces are the best the brain can do to "normalise" the dodgy data into something face-like. You could test this by repeating the experiment with various shapes instead of the faces.
Let me just stress though, these are just the thoughts that struck me. I have no particular expertise in this, and so I might be completely off base!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Owen_Wilson_Cannes_2011.jpg
There may be more to it, though. I have a suspicion this illusion also keys into the propensity of our brains to see faces in anything face-like
In addition, I wonder if that algorithm is accentuating certain facial regions (caricaturing). So that it may better use them in memory comparisons, to achieve identification.
nownki