The Black Iron Prison--In Colour

[Triple Zero]

http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see.html

19 minutes TED talk, starts out as an entertaining demonstration on colours, optical illusions, but then moves on to the concept of perception and from about halfway explicitly addresses some of the BIP ideas about how we are unable to perceive reality, so what is real anyway?

Not so much enlightening or new information, but interesting to watch and perhaps gives some ideas on how to demonstrate the BIP.



Of course, optical illusions like this are nothing new. Even though a lot of people never really give it a second thought. However, one of the important ideas in the BIP is that there are physical bars (gravity, atomic forces), biological (optical illusions and other sensory limitations) and psychological bars (social norms, duty, laws, relationships). And that on a certain fundamental level, they are the same, in the sense that they limit your freedom. And you can never get rid of all of them, especially not the physical ones, and to a lesser extent the biological ones.

[LMNO]

I'd even go a step further, and say that because you can't get rid of them, you learn ways to see around them.  If you don't belive you have any limitations, or if you believe you can get rid of all your bars, then you'll be fooled into thinking you can percieve everything.  But if you know you have a limitation, you can find ways to work around it.

As a very crude example, our eyes are very good at seeing things.  But the eye does have limitations when it comes to seeing very very small things.  Because we know that this limitation exists, we invented the microscope, so we could get around this limitation.