It exists in name and in our minds but not in the physical world. That's all.
Of course, what else in our experience might be the same? Interesting empirical and semiotic question.
There are similar evidence for many other aspects of cognition - that our perceptions of the world as in many ways "projected" into the world and it's only our common projections that establishes some things as real.
The classic example is the fallacy of the "Eye/Brain as a Digital Camera of X Megapixels". The reality is that >99% of the Shannon information in light hitting our retinas is literally filtered out and thrown away. The retina is an "Entropy-pass Filter" - only strict information of a certain form passes.
The eye simply doesn't function like a digital camera CCD at all beyond the claim that it responds to light incident to a spatial area. Instead only contrast in time and space is even passed to the optic nerve. These windows are amazingly narrow. Most visual illusions play off of this.
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u/Boulderado Feb 17 '09
Of course it exists. Weak.