this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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I think this speaks to a significant misunderstanding that most people hold of the way vision actually works.
Most people imagine that vision is a relatively simple process by which our eyes detect and transmit to us the nature of the world. Not so.
Eyes are complex and interesting organs in their own right but fundamentally what they do is relatively simple. They are able to detect and report to the brain certain qualities of the light that hits them. Primarily these are: intensity, direction, and proximity to three points on the frequency spectrum (what we perceive as red, green, and blue). But this data alone is not vision. Vision is a conscious experience our brains create by interpreting and processing this data into the visual field before us—basically, a full scale 3D model of the world in front of us, including the blended information on reflection and emission that color entails.
Quite amazing! Most of this takes place in the human brain, and not the eyes. From this perspective, it is not terribly surprising that an organism with more complex eyes but a much simpler brain might have worse vision than we do.
Ha! I read the following Science new article just today about how Purple Only Exists In Our Brains. It's written for a younger audience (I think), but it lays out how our sight works, and how our brains trick us into seeing purple (a red-blue colour, as opposed to violet).
Poor shrimpos, no purple for them, I bet.
This phrasing always bothers me a little, because, as even the article quotes a scientist saying: “All colors are made up by the brain.”
Purple is special because it triggers from non-continuous wavelengths of light, not because the subjective experience of purple is an invention of the brain. Being 'invented' is something common to all colors. Or sounds. Or tastes.
It’s amazing and crazy to think, too, that the “theater” our brains create is an equilibrium point of laziness (to save energy) and usefulness (to help survival). So, surely, there are things we are just unable to see. But also, probably, there are different things that get mapped to the same things in the “theater.” I’m just speculating though but it makes sense.
It's a good thing we can surpass the limitations of our perception by creating external tools that augment our senses and translate extra-sensory information about the world into something human perceptible. We've even gone so far as to send such devices into space.
We don’t really detect direction of light exactly. Instead we detect the location in the eye where the light landed, and have lenses to focus the light onto our retina. That relationship does imply some of the directionality of the light, by ignoring light that goes in certain directions and relating the direction of light that does get detected to the location it ends up.
By the same logic, we don't detect light, just the change in shape of certain proteins. The sky isn't blue, it's a subset of sunlight. We don't really touch things, we transmit forces with tiny magnets. Computers don't really do math, they just arrange states in certain ways.
The world ~~is beautiful~~ makes my brain release endorphins
*we detect the direction of light by the location in the eye....ect.
There fixed it for you.
etc. It stands for the Latin words et cetera.
You haven't been saying ectcetera have you? Oh no.
Correctors better come correct.
Yeah I was trying to avoid those details. I think it’s fair to summarize that as a system that detects the direction light is coming from.