On the Illusion of Retro-Active Causality

AKA Advanced Waves and Retarded Waves

taking ukemi

In aikido training, “taking ukemi” is the practice of falling and getting thrown, and translates as “receiving body”. Good form requires slapping the mat upon impact; it reduces the force of the initial impact. But how is it that something you do after you hit the mat can affect how hard you initially hit the mat? It seems a case of retroactive causality. Upon further examination, it would become apparent that it is simply an act of spreading the force over a longer duration of time, making it seem as if the overall impact has lessened, when in fact it has just lessened per unit time.

slapping the mat upon impact

The correct form passes the impact from the main body through the shoulder, elbow, hand, in one fluid, continuous motion. In one instance, the impact begins and ends with the body hitting the ground, whereas in another, the impact begins with the body and ends with the handslap.

In shooting a basketball, the same phenomenon occurs – having good follow-through affects the accuracy of the throw. Something done after the ball leaves your hand can change the way the ball leaves you hand. In reality, we can know that the well-prepared body can use a projected feedback loop where the anticipation of the future follow-through is readjusting the shot itself to become more aligned to the anticipated follow-through. You have to do it in order to pretend like you’re going to do it.

follow through

The final and most readily observed example is that of the dropped-and-popped phone. All the parts shoot away from the point of contact, taking with them some of the energy, thus lessening the impact on the more sensitive parts of the device. Retroactive causality it is not. The misperception of time, however, is in our blood.

when you drop your phone

More Musicological Synchronicity

OCTOBER 6, 2012

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/10/more-musicological-synchronicity.html

Retrocausality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocausality

Time Perception Disorder

Cary Wolinsky-Aurora-Getty Images

The following clip retells a very simple experiment that shows us just how easy it is to induce time perception disorder in normal people:

Back in 2006, David Eagleman and his team conducted an experiment in which subjects were simply asked to press a button. Doing so would instantly cause a nearby light bulb to blink. The researchers then added a slight tenth of a second delay between the press of the button and the light coming on and asked subjects to continue pressing the button. For the grand finale, the researchers removed the delay and watched as something completely perplexing happened. The subjects, utterly flabbergasted, insisted that the light would come on before they even pressed the button!


-posted by Ross Pomeroy at Thu, 30 Aug 2012

"Why Do Schozophrenics Hear Voices", Real Clear Science

You Love Right Angles

Robert Williams, Persuasion of Right Angles, 2007

You can tell me ‘til you’re blue in the face, but you brain is not designed to see things as they are.

This is an efficiency-of-vision in the way the brain sees; most would call it misperception. I wonder, however, if we can call it so, if we can see that the brain has been designed to see this way. It’s not a mistake. Trying to seeing things as they are in the first place is the mistake.

On Right Angles

Most humans seem to have a natural impulse to create right angles, and will do so despite attempted conscious override. For example, when trying to draw figure 1, most people will draw figure 2 instead. Figures 3 and 4 are more examples. Notice the right angles that are created in the incorrect examples.

Even after a person has been told of this phenomenon, they will continue to perform the same mistake. See figures 5-7: When given instructions to add “cross-contour lines” to figure 5, the typical subject will produce figure 7, not figure 6. Once again, the tendency to make the lines 'increasingly perpendicular' is evident.

Relevant Findings:

The following is taken from a relevant report; subjects were shown various angles and asked what angle they saw:

Compared to a quadrilateral on its own, judgments of the acute and obtuse angles in the cube drawings were biased towards 90 degrees.

Of interest, the judgments are attracted only to 90
degrees, not to 0 degrees or 180 degrees, 45 degrees and 135 degrees,other possible components of good form.

...an angle illusion could be a top-down, Gestalt effect. When physical conditions approach a ‘simpler’ shape, a percept with symmetry, equality, parallels, and orthogonality is favoured, Gestaltists argue.

If the V means 90 degrees, it is seen as 90 degrees, in a strong version of this theory.

Peterson and Gibson (1993) argue perceptual input and cognitive information are processed in parallel. If recognition influences perception, angles close to 90 degrees on the page might indeed be seen as 90 degrees.

Angle illusion on a picture’s surface
SHERIEF HAMMAD, JOHN M. KENNEDY, IGOR JURICEVIC and SHAZMA RAJANI
University of Toronto at Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto ON M1C1A4, Canada
Received 28 August 2006; accepted 15 March 2007

Spatial Vision, Vol. 21, No. 3–5, pp. 451– 462 (2008)
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008.

Also available online - www.brill.nl/sv
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/18758

Peterson, M. A. and Gibson, B. S. (1993). Shape recognition contributions to figure-ground organization in three-dimensional displays, Cognit. Psychol. 25, 383–429.

Further Interpretations:

In an effort towards simplification, where all angles exist on a spectrum between 90 and 180 degrees, (either angled or straight) it is 'cognitively efficient' to assume that the angle in question is not somewhere on the angle-spectrum, but only at either end. To see things as either good or bad, right or wrong, up or down, is also much easier and at times more effective than discriminating between shades of difference.

In another override (also, one would assume, to maximize cognitive processing), it is, at times (or, more often than not, as it seems) better to "see" what a thing "is" rather than to see what it really looks like. (This implies that the viewer knows that the correctly-drawn cube is, in fact, a cube, with six rectilinear sides, just by looking at the drawing, thus knowing what it is, or is meant to represent.)

So, is this common misperception a result of simple-over-complex, or one of "what it is" over "what it looks like"

The Nature of Illusion