Illusion

Author: Dexin Kong
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3831-5725
Structured and refined with assistance from ChatGPT
AI Automatic Translation (Unreviewed)

Misalignment

At many tourist attractions, there are photographers who specialize in “forced perspective” photography.

By adjusting shooting angles, perspective relationships, depth of field, distance, and similar factors, they can create photos that look almost unbelievable.

For example:

• A person appearing to float in midair
• Someone holding up the sun with one hand
• A distant building seemingly pinched between two fingers

The resulting image often creates a strong sense of contradiction.

The scenery is real.
The photo is real.

Yet what people see appears completely illogical.

Related Research

In reality, similar phenomena have long existed across many mature theories and research directions, for example:

• Research on Mental Models and Internal Representation in Cognitive Science
• Discussions of system state, feedback, and internal models in Cybernetics
• Studies of internal abstraction and environmental perception in Systems Theory
• Observations of KPI systems, reporting structures, and symbolic management in Organizational Theory
• Engineering practices around Embedding, Context, and internal representation structures in AI / LLM Runtime systems

Although these theories and systems are not entirely equivalent, and their terminology and research focus differ considerably, they have all long observed and described similar phenomena.

If a person, an organization, or a piece of software is viewed uniformly as a “system”,

then a system’s understanding of Reality is often based on the Projection continuously formed by its own perceptual system.

The Projection formed by a perceptual system may take many forms:

a photograph, a 3D model, a survey questionnaire, a set of evaluation metrics, a collection of encoded states, a textual description, and so on.

For the sake of convenience in later discussions, the term Projection is used here as a unified way to refer to this phenomenon.

Discussion

Projection naturally has limitations.

Because perceptual systems are constrained by factors such as observation angle, observation position, resolution, distance, and many other conditions, it is impossible for any system to completely observe the entirety of Reality.

As a result, any system will occasionally experience illusions, and this does not necessarily mean that the system itself is malfunctioning.

Sometimes, a particular Projection — much like a forced perspective photograph — may cause the system’s cognition to diverge from Reality.

Closing

For long-running systems, occasional illusions may not necessarily indicate that something is wrong.

Note:
This project is an ongoing independent research effort developed in spare time.
Because of limited time and maintenance capacity,
English documents may contain translation inaccuracies or semantic deviations from the original Chinese texts.
The Chinese version remains the primary reference whenever ambiguity exists.