Riddles, conundrums, illusions and projected self-reflections, etc.

The above painting is by M.C. Escher, a Dutch painter, famous for creating visual riddles, playing with pictorially logical but visually impossible. He called them the “impossible structures” such as the one above where featureless pod-people traverse staircases that seem to go two directions simultaneously. Eyes see illusions, but the mind perceives them as real. Slowly, as science discovers new frontiers, we come to think of our universe as one with 11 dimensions of which we can only see three (four, if we consider time). All the other dimensions are hidden from us, and just like a fish views the world through a cone we see the world in 3 dimensions.As was written by Edwin Abbott, the Shakespearean scholar, we are all flat-landers. We see the world as we want it to be, as a reflection of our own selves. When we are happy, the day is bright and sunny, people we meet are balmy, but when we are sad and morose, we curse the day, the weather, suspect a sinister plot being hatched against us. We are, in a way, trapped in our mind. We also perceive people we meet as how we want them to be and not what they really are. We superimpose our views on the image of the world we live in. Infact, the blue of the sky , the green of the grass is how our eyes mix colors. A simple optical illusion is that of the mirage, or the motion picture. Every movie that we see, gives an illusion of a continuous flow, when it is a conglomeration of images that our brain cannot register.Some say that the universe is a hologram and our existence itself is an illusion. Our notion of time and space is an illusion of our senses. The atom, itself gives the illusion of being sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave. As Heisenberg states, we can never determine the position and velocity of an object at the same time and everything has an inherent quality of uncertainty to it. We look at the railway tracks and in the horizon the two parallel lines seems to meet or even the horizon itself is a line that recedes when approached. Mirrors and glass project the illusion or distortions, the best example of which are kaleidoscope (creating multiple reflections) and the pseudoscope , stereoscope (reversing the depth perception). We experience the natural world through our five senses. And yet everything that we see, that we can feel, that we can taste, that we can hear, that we can perceive with the eyes, everything is temporal.

"Everything in the picture seems to be in place, yet we seem to be in a strange universe where water flows uphill. What is wrong with it? Well, nothing is wrong with it. It is just our minds trying to equate the lines Escher drew with what our senses perceive of the real world."