I’d heard of mindbugs before and was always sort of freaked out by them, so I had never considered them an advantageous product of evolution. I didn’t know that at least visual mindbugs were a result of the retina processing things in two dimensions instead of three dimensions and then automatically converting them into three dimensions in order for us to navigate and survive in a three dimensional world. What freaks me out about mindbugs isn’t the fact that we don’t realize two tables are the same size, but that it shows how much work our mind does in processing without our knowledge or active effort.
Knowing more about mindbugs, it makes what I had known about eye witnesses being extremely unreliable. Our brain jumps to conclusions and fills in the gaps in our memory without us realizing it, so the likelihood that two people will remember the same event accurately and identically is extremely low. I knew implicit biases were a thing but never really considered why they existed. I assumed it had to do with the environment you were raised in or something along those lines. I had never considered that mindbugs would be part of the explanation. Since we don’t know everything about an individual by looking at them, we use their appearance as a basis of sorting them into a social group and then judging them and acting upon that judgement – all subconsciously. I hate knowing that there’s so much brain activity that we can’t control.
It is also extremely odd that you cannot tell that the tables are identical even after you find out. The human brain and the retina will not allow us to see this, unless we use the translucent paper trick.
I wish I didn’t fully learn about mindbugs, either! This concept also freaked me out when thinking about eyewitness memory and the number of falsely convicted criminals were punished and even sentenced to death. I think what’s important is educating people on this error and understanding the magnitude of its importance.
I agree that the concept of mindbugs is startling; however, I think learning about them allows us to question eyewitness testimonials and be more cognizant of how we percieve others. While it is frustrating to know we cannot control our mindbugs, I think learning about them can make us look deeper in our selves to question how we percieve others and help diminish the extent to which eyewitness evidence is considered..
I was also really concerned when I learned about mindbugs. I can think of so many arguments I’ve probably been in where two people both thought they were right, but they very easily both could have been wrong. It is frustrating that so much of what we remember is faulty and I don’t know how much I can do to change that.
It makes you wonder if eye witness accounts should be allowed in hearings because like you mentioned before our memory can sometimes get hazy/fuzzy which leads us to fill in the missing pieces. In doing so we can convict the wrong people of a murder.