Re: The Lunar Paradox

On Sat, 29 Nov 2003 17:44:07 GMT, "Craig Franck"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:

>"Lester Zick" wrote
>
>> "Craig Franck" in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>
>> >True, but when the moon does it, it does strike you as an
>> >illusion. My point was the illusion is caused  by the moon
>> >being place at the same distance from you as objects near
>> >the horizon.
>> >
>> There may be some truth to this. But certainly the moon cannot be
>> placed by the mind in illusional terms anywhere near the terrestrial
>> horizon or it would appear huge.
>
>It only appears as small as it does because the mind has a hard
>time gauging the size of astronomical objects. The sun and moon
>look to be the same size even though the sun is much larger.
>>From how little its size increases, the moon is probably judged to
>be the size of a terrestrial mountain.

The problem though is that the sun and moon are comparably sized in
visual terms for ordinary geometric reasons.
>
>I think the key to understanding this illusion is to consider that the
>rendering of your visual field is about as computationally intense as
>a 3D video game. When viewed as a guided hallucination, the fact
>that we see things as close to how they are is pretty astounding,
>but then the mapping function of world to representation has been
>under strong environmental pressures for quite some time.
>
I'm not sure here what you mean by the phrase strong environmental
pressures. I don't doubt that the process is pretty astounding. Just
take a couple of drinks and see what the result is on vision. But I
think as I remarked to Michael that I prefer to consign the problem to
the X files for the time being. 


Regards - Lester