The Illusion of Depth

Humans believe they have a rich sensory world with precise memories, deep, detailed, and accurate causal models of how things work, and powerful abstractions—because this is how it feels from the inside.

But when tested on simple tasks like “how do bicycles or eyes work” or “what does a US penny or the letter ‘g’ look like” or “if I drop a ball from a moving car, does it fall straight?”, this depth proves illusory.

Many human responses are shallow, incoherent, incomplete, unpredictive, and based on just a few sketchy features. (Much thinking is outsourced to others, the environment, habit, and a lifetime of trial-and-error.) We may only realize this in novel scenarios like trying to do a familiar task for the first time (eg. use a gas station pump, as I learned when I was tasked with filling up my family’s car for the first time, and was left completely baffled why the pump wasn’t working—hadn’t I seen my parents fill up the car countless times on trips, how could I not be able to do it?) or under rigorous testing, and otherwise, go about in a haze of superficialities.