And as we’ve learned in other SDMB threads, some of these mirror-image anti-humans walk among us unnoticed. Some of them don’t even know they’re not human.
The sculpture only shows the front. It looks like this: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-xb1sgWzYkf4/TiHqgru8qkI/AAAAAAAAzBY/w-ok2oMwBy4/s1000/IMG_1550.JPG (a bit like Mount Rushmore)
The resolution falls rapidly as you move away from the front surface, so it doesn’t look like much from the side.
Mount Rushmore? Is that the right picture?
Well, that was taken from the side. From the front it looks more like http://www.3dlasergifts.com/uploaded_files/images/products/s_d2adaff1f306a2ac30350362c20cddd113.jpg (I’m not putting my face here). It’s 3D, but only shows the front surface.
OK, I get it now. Thanks.
I imagine that (with our heads in normal orientation) we’re slightly better at depth perception for vertical bars than for horizontal ones, since one avenue of depth perception is the percieved shift against the background for an object viewed by our left vs. right eyes – if a horizontal object was featureless, smooth, extended past our vision on each side and perfectly aligned with our eye’s left-right axis, we’d have no depth perception of it from that channel.
But this would be a very minor effect, I think, since that’s not the only avenue of depth perception, and of course few real world objects would be horizontal exactly in line with our eyes (even if one was, people often cock their head to look at interesting things).
Imagine your nares being also aligned vertically.
Our foreheads would have to be shaped differently. I would say njtt is correct in thought based on our bodies having bilateral symmetry. But even more importantly, our brains are bilateral. With each hemisphere of the brain holding a visual cortex to the opposite eye, a vertical alignment would become arbitrary to this aspect of our physiology: Which eye (being top and bottom) gets assigned to which half of the brain?
As several others already stated, your mirror-image isn’t reversed, it’s a direct reflection. I just want to add that there’s a psychological factor, too. You think that left and right are reversed because you’re imagining yourself rotated 180 degrees around a vertical axis to face yourself. If you imagine yourself rotated around a horizontal axis instead, you would think that your image’s top and bottom were reversed but left and right were the same.