Publication
An implicit or explicit assumption in most vision research is that there exist objects in the external world, and that we typically perceive them as they are. Illusions and other misperceptions are rare failures of veridical perception. Philosophers have questioned the existence of objects for millennia. For example, Bishop Berkeley proposed that objects disappear when we close our eyes - in other words, he suggested that objects are mind-dependent. Here I show that, given the assumptions and commonly acknowledged results of vision research, there are indeed no ordinary objects. Objects are mind-dependent interpretations of the particles of physics, which, contrary to objects, are mind-independent. Objects are not the input but the output of visual processing. The primary argument is that vision is a non-injective mapping from the large space of physical states into the much smaller set of visual representation. For this reason, there can exist many such mappings, each making up a distinct visual system. Hence, one implication is that different observers may perceive the world quite differently. With a series of experimental findings, I will show that this is indeed the case. For example in spatial vision, different paradigms, such a visual, vernier, and bisection acuity, correlate very little with each other. The same is true for spatial illusions. I will argue that illusions are not misperceptions but reflect individual perception, leaving no space for the existence of objects.