The Visualization Fallacy

A seldom-observed cognitive problem: We visualize concepts, and then we falsely associate the made-up visualization with the concept (usually with the help of movies and TV).

For instance, aliens travel in saucer-shaped ships, right? If you ever spot a saucer flying around at night in the desert, you'd certainly know how to explain it. That's an alien! We "know" this from movies and TV. Some random visualization caught on, creating a false consensus that's utterly non-meaningful.

Alien visitors may or may not be real, but the flying saucer trope almost certainly isn't. We couldn't begin to imagine alien tech, yet most people feel they could identify an alien spaceship because they've been conditioned by some random visualization. It's a form of tail-wagging.

If you walk around an old, dark house at night and encounter a hovering gauzy white presence, your brain will likely tell you - based on movies and TV - that this may be a ghost. Yet, for all you or I know, disembodied spirits look like manicotti, and are delicious, and we've been eating them for years.

When abstract concepts (or concrete concepts with no observable examples) become visualized, we easily become tied to that visualization.

It works at subtler levels, as well. We think we know a few things about how parallel universes work, but for most of us, that's entirely been forged by treatment in fiction. And it's a hindrance. Modeling and conjecture have their uses, but when we unconsciously lock in to a certain conjecture, that's conceptual kludge which must be cleared out before we can really understand. It's an intellectual detour; active miscomprehension dragging us further from the truth than mere non-comprehension ever could. But we can't help ourselves. I'm not sure even the most objective-minded scientist can avoid this trap.

Spiritual teacher Adyashanti (who I consider the only 100% non-bullshit living speaker on the subject) observes that no one ever experiences ultimate reality and reports back that "it was exactly what I'd thought!" Everyone hoping for such an experience shoots for some imaginary canned fluffy-fluff (usually something they read in a book). The folly of seeking after some errant visualization lures them further and further away from the truth.


As with most cognitive failings, this evolved as a feature, not a bug. There is no such thing as a table, or a tree, or a toenail beyond the human brain. Such categories are entirely abstract. That's clear from observing the enormous trouble computers have in distinguishing between classes of objects (a tree from a bush from a telephone pole from a totem pole). This might seem like a computational deficiency, but it's not them; it's us. Our diverse universe does not really divide in this way, so we've been sloppily kludging it all along. Our taxonomies are fuzzy, arbitrary, even irrational. That's why it vexes the bejesus out of computers.

Yet our human flair for generalization serves a purpose. If we allowed ourselves to remain freshly aware of every ant, or taxi, or eyelash - as unique expressions - we'd never get anything done. Preoccupied with each and every fern, we'd miss the tiger dashing out of the underbrush. It is evolutionarily adaptive to dismiss the mundane and key in on the surprising.

In time, nearly everything becomes mundane as more and more becomes patterned. We disconnect from the Actual as it's subsumed by overarching generalization. You don't even perceive the chair you're sitting in because its individuality has been lost to the category. It's not real, it's been reduced to a concept. Not a unique and constantly (subtly) changing arrangement of matter, but merely "a chair". Similarly, you've only interacted with a tiny fraction of the molecules in your living quarters, yet you've convinced yourself you have a perceptual and conceptual grip on the chaotic mass of matter you associate with home. It all stands on the flimsy proposition that we know perfectly well what a "home" is. We abstract it, then we exist in the abstraction (much as we imagine ghosts to be gauzy things, then pattern our world to that visualization).

We create and inhabit Worldworld, a universe of symbols and categories. By adulthood, we barely register anything freshly unless we are surprised. Things which fit poorly within their apparent category blink back into our awareness, becoming real and individual until we manage to reclassify them (that's a necktie, not a snake) or make it fit better into its category (adding a missing fourth leg to a table).

(Note: this is why time seems to speed up as we age. Babies live in the Real World of fresh perception, but as we age we replace Real World with Worldworld, losing the moment-by-moment experience of full reality (an experience babies have, and that we envy) making time appear to fly.)

Living in abstract Worldworld, we forget that labels are mere labels, and that the approximation we've swapped in for reality is a cheat - a vast simplification. Worldworld is not the real world, just a model thereof. In the real world, there's no such thing as ferns. A fern is only distinct from the ground it grows out of and the surrounding air if we've drawn those dichotomies intellectually. Ultimately, it's all fresh and unique and interdependent. It all just Is.

So when we associate aliens with flying saucers, or ghosts with gauzy white presences, it's no different from the expedient means we use to model our entire conceptual world. In the parallel universe of Worldworld (I think parallel universes are subjective frames of perspective; whenever we reframe our attention, we shift into another reality), the aliens really do arrive in flying saucers!


Read the follow-up posting, Visualization Fallacy Redux

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