The Problem with “I Saw It with My Own Eyes”

Apr 13, 2025

What if the biggest flaw in our justice system isn’t bias, but trusting our headset’s version of reality as the reality—without even knowing we’re doing it?

You see, we all walk around wearing a built-in virtual reality headset.

Not the clunky goggles with controllers—this one is invisible, internal, and always on. It’s your mind’s rendering system. Every sight, sound, memory, and emotion gets filtered and projected through this headset to create your moment-to-moment experience.

You’re not seeing the world directly.
You’re seeing your version of it.

This is how we navigate life—through a personal, real-time simulation built from a mix of sensory input, past experiences, expectations, and thought. And usually, it works so seamlessly, we never question it.

Until we realize:
our entire justice system is based on the idea that what people perceive and remember is objective truth.

Spoiler alert: it’s not.

The Two-Step Illusion of “Eyewitness Truth”

Step 1: Observation isn’t objective.
When someone “witnesses” an event, they’re not recording it like a security camera. They’re experiencing a headset-rendered version of it—filtered through their emotional state, cultural context, personal history, attention span, and whatever thoughts happened to be passing through at the time.

It feels real. But it’s an internal rendering.

Step 2: Memory is even messier.
Later, when asked to recall the event, they don’t “play back” a mental video. The brain reconstructs the memory—often loosely—based on fragments and assumptions. It fills in the blanks, smooths the edges, and occasionally adds a little artistic flair.

And just like that, a re-rendered memory is treated as evidence.

And We Build Cases On This?

Courtrooms treat eyewitness testimony as gold. Someone says, “I saw him do it,” and the room goes still.

But no one really sees what happened.
They see what their headset showed them.

Psychology research has been raising red flags for decades:

Eyewitness memories are fragile and malleable.
They're shaped by leading questions, time delays, and emotional pressure.
Even confident witnesses can be wrong—and still believe they’re right.

And yet, those testimonies can carry more weight than physical evidence.

Why? Because the headset-generated story feels true.
And when something feels true inside the headset, we rarely question it.

The Rendering of the Rendering

Here’s where it gets even trickier: people often aren’t remembering the original event at all.

They’re remembering their last retelling of it.
A memory of a memory. A re-rendering of a re-rendering.

And every time the story gets told again—whether to a police officer, a lawyer, or a jury—it becomes more familiar, more polished… and often, less accurate.

It’s like making a copy of a copy of a copy, and expecting it to hold up in court.

This Isn’t Just About the Justice System

The courtroom is just one place where our headset-generated realities collide. But this same illusion plays out everywhere:

We misremember conversations.
We judge people based on filtered perceptions.
We get upset over imagined scenarios.
We swear our version of events is “the truth.”

But what we’re reacting to is never the world as it is.
It’s always our rendering of it.

So, What Can We Do?

We don’t have to throw out eyewitness accounts altogether.
But we can get more honest about what they really are:
mental renderings, not mental recordings.

When we start to understand how the headset works—how every experience we have is created from the inside-out—we gain clarity. We react less. We question more. We stop trusting every thought as gospel.

And maybe, just maybe, we start to build systems—and lives—that make space for the possibility that what we think is true… might just be a really convincing rendering.

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