🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (11 tweets)
imagine if the future people in WALL-E had spent so many generations looking at screens that they lost the ability to tune into their depth perception and had to relearn it https://t.co/nuafbMU2JQ
the first few people who got their depth perception back would have their minds completely blown the moment it happened - it would not be gradual, it would happen all at once - and would be completely unable to explain their experience to everyone else
"it's like... i can *see* how *far away* different things are! holy shit! i can't explain it but everything looks completely different now! the world is so much bigger than i thought!" "sounds fake wtf are you talking about, how could that possibly work"
what changes about your experience when you get your depth perception back is not that you know some factual statement that you didn't know before; it's that your perception, at a precognitive preconscious level, has literally acquired a new dimension
you are literally seeing an aspect of reality you couldn't see before. this isn't something you can really explain to someone who doesn't see it. the best you can do is try to give them instructions for doing weird stuff that might restore their depth perception natively
you also don't have to understand anything about the physics or neuroscience of depth perception to have it. you don't have to know what parallax is or have the idea that the brain is capable of inferring depth from comparing the views from your left vs. right eye
the foundational thing is to have it at all. there are things you can do with depth perception that others will struggle with, like accurately hitting animals with projectiles from a distance, and you can demonstrate this skill to others, at least