Hoodwinked: Exploring Our Culture's Profound Illusions

A new edition of my 2023 book, with notes, material from my earlier book, and a new introduction

Introduction

All of us are familiar with the basic idea of an illusion. Driving down the road… if the sun is just right, it looks as if there’s a large puddle ahead. But as we approach that spot in the road, the puddle disappears. It’s a mirage, one of the simplest illusions we encounter.

What causes the illusion? The light that enters our eyes stimulates electrical signals in our optic nerves that are so similar to those produced by a real puddle that our brains are fooled into creating a picture of water. We may react accordingly, say, by slowing down to avoid the splash a real puddle would produce.

It's a simple and largely inconsequential trick, this mistaking a reflective pavement for water.

But there exist more sophisticated illusions that can have profound consequences in our lives. Sometimes, we perceive a danger that turns out not to be real, but meanwhile it produces a reflex that might get us in actual trouble. Alternatively, we may perceive a sense of safety or stability that turns out to be illusory, and we might miss an important warning.

I will make the case in this work that much of what we understand to be true about the world, and about our presence in it, constitutes an illusion.

The purpose of this book is to help us examine our understanding of the world, and of ourselves. That’s not something that we ordinarily do. We simply accept that what we see when we open our eyes in the morning is what’s real, and we act accordingly. We form impressions of the situations and people we encounter during our day, and we assume that those impressions are accurate. When our impressions turn out to be illusory, we might face consequences that are embarrassing or even dangerous.

What is an illusion?

In general, an illusion is a distortion of perception. Optical illusions trick us into perceiving something differently than it actually exists, so what we see does not correspond to physical reality.

But what is physical reality, actually? We generally assume that physical reality is what we perceive. Except, not always, if what we’re perceiving is an illusion.

Okay then, what is perception? According to one definition, perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand our environment. But how are we to know whether our interpretations of sensory information accurately represent our environment? And furthermore, what is our environment? Does it have an independent reality apart from our perception of it?

It turns out that these questions and more are essential to understanding our nature as human beings, and they will be thoroughly considered in the material that follows. We will begin by asking how the world looks to us and whether what the world appears to be is actually what the world is.

Next time: An Illusion is Real if It’s All You Know