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Originally Posted by Angela  Hey, that's just the kind of thing people are often saying about the Spinning Ballerina.
"Nu-uh!" they say. It's the program making it appear to spin, YOU can't make it appear to spin with your mind, that is absurd and if you believe you can you are obviously delusional!  |
Hi Angela, but don't you see it another way too? You can't, in fact, make it appear to spin with your mind. If the program stopped, it would stop the illusion of movement altogether. You can to some extent deliberately choose to see her rotating one way or the other, and even that seems to be not completely under your control, but you can't make it something it isn't, and we still haven't come to the really significant part - the word at the end of the url is 'illusion'. Don't you see what that means - you and I as human beings who can do science and test theories can actually tell precisely what this strange phenomenon is (admittedly only as far as certain limits perhaps, and long before the quantum level). It is a 2D animation in black and white, which our evolved brains can't help but interpret as some representation of a person moving, and moving in 3D.
While it is running, the opposite is true: you can't NOT make it appear to spin with your mind. No indication to you there that there might be something called physical reality independent of your mind? Can you make it into a sword-swallowing pink unicorn riding a motocycle? Maybe you can just imagine one of those and pretend you turned the ballerina into it. Can you take her out of her imaginary third dimension, have her climb out the computer and fix you a nice fat spliff perhaps? Can I **** her and will our kids be pretty?
I give up.