> At bottom, causality requires a temporal order judgment: did my motor act come before or after that sensory signal?
The problem is, the brain is a causality-building machine; it loves to find causality where there is none.
If you tell a room of 100 people the following story: "A person fell, there was a sound of a gunshot, and another person was seen running", and then ask each member of the audience to retell the story and explain what happened, a majority of the audience will reconstruct the story by placing the gun shot first, and explain that what happened is the person was killed by the gun.
In this example, no perception-lag is involved; if a story doesn't make sense the way it's told, but makes sense with a few "minor" alterations, then the brain automatically makes those alterations in order to generate meaning.
Hence: superstition, unreliability of witnesses, etc.
There's another layer of pattern-finding involved: "Why the hell is a person telling me these facts? If they're being told this way the other person must also believe they are related."
It's like conditional probability: Knowing that they're being communicated to me, it's very likely these facts are related.
The problem is, the brain is a causality-building machine; it loves to find causality where there is none.
If you tell a room of 100 people the following story: "A person fell, there was a sound of a gunshot, and another person was seen running", and then ask each member of the audience to retell the story and explain what happened, a majority of the audience will reconstruct the story by placing the gun shot first, and explain that what happened is the person was killed by the gun.
In this example, no perception-lag is involved; if a story doesn't make sense the way it's told, but makes sense with a few "minor" alterations, then the brain automatically makes those alterations in order to generate meaning.
Hence: superstition, unreliability of witnesses, etc.