The last guy who asked me that is singing from the bottom of a well
They say (this being the ubiquitous they) that images entering the lens in your eyes are refracted into an upside-down version of the original image. Your brain then interprets the image as being right-side up. (You can verify this empirically by taking the lens out of a person's eye and putting it in front of a piece of paper; the image on the paper will be different from the one you see by looking at what the lens is looking at.)
What does this say about the human brain? We're not seeing that image as upside-down; it's been flipped back for us. I know it's a trite point, but I find it utterly bizarre that such a fundamental part of our perception of the world is fundamentally altered by our brain before we get around to perceiving it. What else are our brains doing without telling us? Does it matter? Can empiricism work? I used to think it could - it seemed that there wasn't much else to believe in if perceptions couldn't be, but if they're being filtered? They're bullshit.
On a lighter note, the empiricists themselves were righteously full of it, but that doesn't mean they weren't on to something.
What does this say about the human brain? We're not seeing that image as upside-down; it's been flipped back for us. I know it's a trite point, but I find it utterly bizarre that such a fundamental part of our perception of the world is fundamentally altered by our brain before we get around to perceiving it. What else are our brains doing without telling us? Does it matter? Can empiricism work? I used to think it could - it seemed that there wasn't much else to believe in if perceptions couldn't be, but if they're being filtered? They're bullshit.
On a lighter note, the empiricists themselves were righteously full of it, but that doesn't mean they weren't on to something.